A Moment Too Late
by ArgoForg
Summary: Sometimes it takes a tragedy to bring truths to the surface. Bart Allen (Impulse) learns that the hard way, when tragedy causes him to admit how much he cared for someone. NOW COMPLETE!
1. Dirge

ONE – Dirge

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

Archive: Fanfiction.net, so far.I've got no problem with this being posted elsewhere, just please e-mail and ask me.

Summary: Sometimes it takes a tragedy to bring truths to the surface and into the light of understanding.Bart Allen (Impulse) learns that the hard way.

Rating: PG-13 for slight violence, and situations that may be construed as 'adult'; same for language, because tense situations sometimes cause tense people to say bad words.

Disclaimer: All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.I am not making any profit from their use, mostly because I already have all that extra money from illegally taking bribes in the infamous "ArgoForg Point-Shaving Scandal" that has made me ineligible for the NCAA Basketball Tournament through the year 2006.

Author Notes: Okay, this is my first YJ Fanfic, but it was a story that had been creeping around this edges of my head for a while, and it was one I wanted to tell.I know I go 3rd-person omniscient here, but some of the heads are too fun to stay out of.Apologies to Kator if this has a bit of the "The Noble Sacrifice" feel to it, especially in the beginning; apologies to anyone who thinks the story has too much of a 'been there, done that' feel to it.Apologies beyond that for the fact there's a lot of angst here.

If you don't like Impulse-Arrowette/Bart-Cissie, you might feel out of sorts here.Sorry about that, too… but as other people has said a lot better than me, they just 'feel' right together.You can either say this story takes place in an alternate timeline where Arrowette doesn't leave the team after YJ #15, or that Cissie's made her way back to the team and picked up Arrowette right where she left off.Or you can say my head's filled with goat-cheese and I wouldn't know continuity if it hit me upside the head.Read and review if you want, but above all, enjoy!

On a side note, I wrote the plug, summary and first chapter of this story before the events of September 11, 2001, and didn't even think until I sat down to write again that putting together a story that centered on a life-and-death tragedy that affected YJ might hit so close to home for so many.All I can say is that my heart is with the people in New York City, Pennsylvania and Washington, and with all of my countrymen at this point in time. However, if anyone chooses to read any allegory or metaphor into this story, comparing it to those tragedies and any that may come afterward, worldwide, I would like to note that it is wholly unintentional.Fiction has no comparison to the effects of real life.

Boy, I was right... sometimes I _don't _know when to shut up.

* * * * *

ONE – Dirge

"Here's the sitch, people," Robin said crisply as he leapt off the Super-Cycle, his boots kissing the rooftop silently.He looked at the roof-access door.For some reason, silhouetted against the last light of the sunset, it looked even more menacing than he would have figured.He shook the thought off, not liking it.

"Ten minutes ago, STAR Labs security had a breach at this building.This is the fourth time in the past two weeks in different tech-labs around the area; same M.O., probably the same perp.Ballistics and surveillance pegged him as a meta, and we think we have an I.D."

He looked back at the five other members of Young Justice, who were staring at him blankly.He could almost see the question mark forming over Bart's head.He didn't have the heart to ask the young speedster if it was a question over what he'd just said or if he was just wondering why they hadn't already run inside and taken care of the situation.Not that anyone else looked any clearer on what he'd just said.

"Come again?"Arrowette asked, raising her hand as if she was in school and didn't want to break the teacher's concentration.The blonde's blue eyes were wide.Wonder Girl, though silent, had the same sort of look on her face: a look that suggested to him that he might as well have been speaking Latin.Or that her mind was obscured by the same hazy smoke Secret— floating next to her and touching a slender finger to her lips— was made of.

"Who's Mo?"Impulse asked, guilelessly.

Superboy was a little less questioning.His expression slowly made its way into a smile."Try English, Boy Genius.Real people don't talk like that."

Robin rubbed at his mask._Forgot.It's not like hanging with Dick or patrolling with Bruce.Don't simplify, just remember they probably don't know what a shotgun scatter pattern is or how the police file a ballistics report._

"Okay," he said, allowing a bit of a smile to come to his own face.A grim one.Couldn't let the whole façade down; not while he was behind the mask, anyway."Plain and simple.In the last two weeks someone has broken into four different labs around here and made off with technical equipment.It was only a matter of time before he'd try STAR Labs here, so Red Tornado and I started monitoring their alarms.Anyway, we got a bite tonight, and I think that this is the same guy—"

Bart broke in excitedly."And his name's Mo, right?"

"That's M.O., Bart."Robin chided quietly."It stands for _Modus Operandi._Method of Operation."

Bart paused a moment, a rare feat for him, and then shrugged, a confused expression still on his face."Well that's even worse than Mo.Maybe he needs a 'Bum-bum-BUM' or something."

Robin felt the insane need to beat his head into a wall."The guy calls himself Volcano.He's a pay-for-hire thief with high-end heat powers and an amped-up body.Fast reflexes, enhanced strength and endurance."

"But nothing we can't handle."Wonder Girl said with a smile.

"They haven't come up with that yet," Superboy grinned.

Robin nodded."Even so, I want to be careful.Impulse, you scout ahead.Be careful, though.I have a layout of the place; there's a lot of hallways that would be perfect places for— "

"He's not there."Bart reported, his after-images still flickering after he blurred back into focus.But he was gone between one eyeblink and the next."Least, I didn't see him."

"— ambushes."Robin sighed._Should have known better._"You've been through already?"

Bart nodded, grinning amiably."Right after you said 'Impulse, scout ahead'."

Kon fought back a scowl without much success.Cassie looked to the sky as if she was looking for moral support and exhaled quietly.Suzie— Secret— just hung her head.

Cissie finger-flicked his ear.Bart yelped.

"We've had this talk before, Impulse," she said quietly, and with no menace at all.Just as though she was gently reminding him of it."Didn't we?"

The effect on Bart was immediate, however.

"...sorry, Cissie..." he murmured, suddenly the utter soul of contrition.His eyes looked as big and shiny as Bambi's beneath the amber goggles.Tim would have sworn he was half a step from shuffling his big feet.

"Stop that."Arrowette smirked at him.

Robin stared._Now, that's a change.Something to look into, possibly.Later.Business first._

"Well, we'll keep alert, anyway.Secret, you're going to reconnoiter through the air ducts, see if he's hiding himself from view.Impulse, _once I've finished here, _you'll take point.Stay within shouting distance, in case you find him.The rest of us will stay close.Kon, Cass, stay tight and be ready to hit fast.The hallways and offices won't allow a lot of flight room to gain speed."

There were scattered nods from all around as they prepared to enter through the rooftop. 

"And be careful.I don't think he's had time to get through all the security and make off beneath our noses.I'm betting he's in there."

"Ten minutes is a lot of time, Robin," Cissie said, pinching her lip thoughtfully."Especially if he's super-human.You really think he's still here?"

"I'd stake my life on it."Robin said, adjusting the lenses of his mask as they prepared to descend into the building.

He had no idea those words would be somewhat prophetic.

* * *

Bart Allen somehow expected Young Justice to eventually find Volcano; he just didn't expect them not to be able to see the thief when they did find him.But that was exactly what happened in one of the larger labs on the second floor.

It was still well-lit, despite the absence of workers— a fact Kon hadn't hesitated to point out to Bart.

But Bart pointed out right back that he couldn't _see _him, anyway.In addition to any of the tech he'd stolen, he'd apparently also stolen and put on a prototype light-refraction suit that had rendered him almost totally invisible.

To anyone that wasn't Robin.

Of course Robin had been prepared— he was always prepared.He wondered how Robin had learned it.Bart just couldn't imagine Batman talking to his protégée in that same droning, 'learn from me, again' tone that Max sometimes used.Oh, yeah.Right."See, Robin, you never know when you'll be fighting conquering starfish or the giant killer monkeys or whatever, so always carry an extra banana and a can of Starfish-B-Gone."Well, whatever the big scary Bat did, it worked.

Robin had stopped them right at the office the guy was at and pointed.At nothing.And before Kon could even get a good laugh in or Bart could run over and knock on Rob's head to see if it was hollow, he'd silenced them all: 

"You can't see him visually.He probably took the prototype camo-suit that uses light-refraction technology."Robin said, and then looked at the empty center of the lab."That works against some of us, Volcano.But I'm using a thermal imaging overlay.And you're giving off enough heat to stand out like Superman in a murder line-up.Give up now."

Bart had been half-tempted to knock on Robin's head anyway.The guy had obviously been spending too many nights on all-night stakeouts by himself.That idea had lasted until a voice from the middle of the room spat out a four-letter word that Bart wasn't about to pretend he'd heard before.

Things had accelerated pretty rapidly after that.After several focused beams of heat had erupted and caused the team to scatter, Robin had pointed out to Bart where the shimmer of heat— like a mirage on a hot street— would help pinpoint Volcano.And then he'd sent the big guns in: Superboy and Wonder Girl had been happy to lay into the guy, but the invisibility and his aura of heat had made the fight a lot less fair.A couple lucky punches had made the man stagger back a couple feet, but he'd given as good as he got.

"Careful!"Robin yelled and ducked.Cassie smacked into the wall above him, skidding down painfully and shaking her head, clearing the cobwebs.She'd been tossed away as casually as if she'd weighed nothing.

"Was it me that said, 'Nothing we can't handle'?"She asked, muzzily.

"Yeah,"Bart supplied helpfully as a concentrated beam of heat energy scorched the wall that he had been standing in front of a millisecond ago.He was still shaking his stinging fist.Punching the guy at a hundred times a second had sounded like a really good idea until Bart found out that Volcano's body was like a giant furnace.He could still feel the burns on his knuckles, and he still had no idea if he'd been whaling on Volcano's head or his shoulder or for that matter, his elbow.Or a hundred different places.He wasn't anywhere near Bart's league, but the guy was _fast._

"Rob," Kon said, nursing his arm, where a lucky blast had tagged him."Dude, he's not falling, even with me and Wonder Girl going full-bore.We can barely see him, let alone know if we're hurting him.And those heat blasts _hurt._What do we do?"

"We even the odds," Robin said, then cupped a hand around his mouth."Secret, _now!_"__

And just like that, the room around the invisible Volcano began to fill with smoke.Bart glanced up at the ceiling, and saw that the slight stagger had placed him directly under one of the air vents, and Secret had just spilled out to enshroud Volcano.Immediately, in the haze, Bart could see a shadowy form fill out, where the smoke wafted up against something solid, where the light couldn't reach him to be refracted.Volcano turned out to be slightly smaller than, say, the ceiling.He was broad and even in that shadowy form, looked like he very well could have had muscles on top of muscles.Bart was half-glad he couldn't see the guy's face.The body was vicious-looking enough.

But even more than that, at least now, it was visible.Trust Robin to have a plan.

"On him, Robin," said Secret's voice, from the fog.There was something a little bit spooky about the fact she could talk without forming a mouth, but by the same token, Bart thought it was totally cool, too.Max would lose it if Bart could find a way to speak without a mouth.

"Okay, there he is!Superboy, Wonder Girl, Impulse!Take him down!Arrowette!"

Cissie had backed up toward one of the walls of the lab, not out of any sense of fear, but to give her more time to react to any of the heat blasts that might have come her way.She glanced Robin's way as the two major-league powerhouses veered in."I'm here!"

"Can you squeeze a liquid nitrogen arrow in there?"Robin asked."That should cool him down."

"Well, yeah," she said, and then stared at him for a moment."But aren't you worried that might kill him?I mean it _is _liquid nitrogen."

Robin shook his head."Not as amped up as he is.Do it."

He then glanced around and did a double-take as he saw Bart, still standing there next to him.His voice rose."Impulse!What are you still doing here?"

Bart blinked a couple times; as far as he was concerned, that was self-evident.Couldn't he make up his mind?"I wanted to make sure there weren't any more instructions, or anything like that.You know, so I didn't run off without listening or— "

"NO!"Robin yelled, in a manner that made Bart wonder if maybe he needed a vacation or something.Max usually said he needed one after he yelled at Bart like that.At least the veins in Robin's forehead weren't showing, like Max's sometimes did."Just take some of the heat off the other two!"

"Uh, sure.Okay!"Bart said, and left a series of after-images as he began to circle around Volcano's form in the smoke, chanting about how he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn if he tried.

Volcano responded with a heat beam that nearly scorched Bart's hair.He apparently wasn't big into vocals.

* * *

Arrowette nocked the arrow with its fragile head and pulled the bowstring taut as she aimed.She didn't like this.Most of the villains Young Justice fought were big into the villain banter— the growling of empty threats, the snarling about how they would pay dearly, the grousing about them being pesky kids.Kind of like Scooby-Doo villains with superpowers.

But not Volcano.He was eerily quiet after his initial single-word outburst.No threats, no growls of rage, no nothing.For some reason, that worried her.Did it mean he was more professional than many of the super-powered types they'd seen?Was he just less bombastic?Or more focused?

She didn't know, Cissie admitted to herself.And maybe that was what worried her.

Arrowette sighted.Right now, Wonder Girl was leading in with a pair of punches to his head— _Good one, Cassie.Give him a good one for me— _and Kon was using his tactile telekinesis to try to take his light-refractive suit apart at the seams.And there was Bart, sticking his tongue out and presenting too tempting a target to pass up, but zipping around too elusively for Volcano to draw a bead on._Be careful, cutie, _she thought before she could squelch it.She nearly shook her head and smiled wryly.

Nearly.But she was in her own state of focus now.Inhale, exhale, inhale and draw, hold.She held the bowstring, kept the arrow carefully pointed; her arms tensed, and she waited for an opening to release.

She didn't wait long.

* * *****

"Got it!"Superboy yelled triumphantly, rewarded with a flash of light through the haze of smoke, and the sound of high-quality space-age textures unraveling at the seams."The suit's trashed, thanks to my tactile telekinesis— "

"We never would have guessed."Impulse said as he continued to run around, drawing fire."Maybe you should wear a sign or something, you know?'I have Tactile Telekinesis.Be Warned.' "

Superboy half-grinned."Ah, you're just jealous 'cause all you can do is run f—GGLK!"

"Run what?"Bart asked, and immediately saw the problem, even through Secret's smoky haze.Volcano's hand— a hand that was nearly the size of Bart's head and completely visible— had stabbed out and grasped the Boy of Steel around the throat.

And then he stalked out of the smoke, glancing around, not saying a word.He was huge, all right... whoever named him wasn't joking— he did look like a great big boiling mountain.Volcano was tall, red-skinned, and had a chest that probably given Superman a run for the money, even covered up by the leather combat vest.He also gave off an aura of heat that Bart could feel even at a distance.In fact, every square inch of him that wasn't covered by clothing gave off heat shimmers, like the hood of a car in the summer.

None of that made Bart think twice, however.What did make him worry was the look in the large man's fiery red eyes.A look that seemed to say that he not only expected everything Young Justice was dishing out, but he was fully prepared to walk right through it.

And them.

* * *

"Give me a crease, give me a crease.Half a foot.Four inches, something."Cissie murmured, like a mantra.Her arms remained rigid, her muscles taut, poised to release the arrow at a moment's notice.She had been ready to release when Superboy had shredded his light-refractive suit, but the sight of Volcano's monstrous size and obvious strength had caused her to hold off for a fraction of a moment, and now that momentary window of opportunity was gone.

Volcano held the struggling Superboy between him and her, as if the whole time he was thinking he had better things to do.And while the larger man might not have been planning to use the Boy of Steel as a shield, Cissie had seen how fast he'd picked Kon up, and knew that he could just as easily put him right in the path of her arrow.Maybe if he wasn't looking, she thought, but that was an abortive thought, too— Volcano's red eyes were roving back and forth, gauging his threats.So she held on the shot, and waited, cursing the whole time.

"C'mon, c'mon, come on... put him down, look away, something."

One second passed.Bart leaped up, his fist raised to pound away on the bigger man's head, never once seeing Volcano's free hand come up in a clenched fist until it smacked him in the face.

If not for his reflexes, his skull might have been shattered— Cissie felt her heart get stuck in her throat at the thought.But either his reflexes or his aura saved him; he crashed to the tile floor in a tumble of arms and legs, shaking his head dazedly, a hairline crack visible in his goggles.

Another second passed.

"Superboy!"Wonder Girl exclaimed as she flashed around him."Put him down, you— "

The next word never came, because at that moment Volcano hurled the thrashing Superboy at his attacker, so fast that Wonder Girl had no chance to catch him.Or avoid him.The two crashed into the heavy wall of the lab with a sickening thud.

He looked as though he'd barely tossed Kon.He didn't over-extend, the way Cissie had hoped he might have, but he did follow through, and for a moment, at least, he was exposed.It wasn't the shot she would have wanted.But it was likely the only shot she was going to get.

And so Cissie King-Jones— the heroine known as Arrowette— released the most fateful shaft of her entire young life.The bowstring sang like a chorus, and the arrow sped, straight and true, for Volcano's midsection.The blue liquid snugly captured in the fragile cylindrical arrowhead seemed to wash forward, as if sensing its freedom.

And then the arrow stopped, a scant inch from its target, plucked from midair by a meaty hand.

Cissie's eyes widened.

Volcano's follow-through had not left him open after all; instead, he had merely tossed Kon and then brought his hand back, with a speed that defied belief and caught the arrow by the shaft, half an instant before the arrowhead impacted.

The large red man looked at the arrow as though he was studying its construction, and then, his red eyes flicked up to its owner.He never once said a word.

She did, however.Two, in fact."Aww, _crud._"

But before she could even react beyond that, his hand had come around in that same torrid arc and hurled the arrow back at her, every bit as straight and true as her shot had been.

* * *

As Volcano threw it, the arrow hung in mid-air, as if it would stay there, forever.

It just.Hung.There.

Instinctively, Bart knew it was moving.It _had _to be.And just as instinctively, he knew he would never be able to catch it, even as he pulled himself from the ground.He knew it was going to hit her.It was going to hit Cissie.

Cissie, who couldn't vibrate her molecules or change herself to a vapor form to allow it to pass through harmlessly.

Cissie, who wasn't super-strong like Kon or Cassie, who didn't have any sort of invulnerability to cold.

Cissie, who was backed up against the wall and couldn't get away, who didn't have speed-of-light reflexes to catch the arrow the way Volcano did.

Cissie, who—

"No!"Bart screamed, even as he leapt to his feet in a space of time that made electrons look sluggish.His heart hammered a hummingbird tattoo as his legs started to pump, his fingers nearly brushing the fletchings of the arrow in the first moment.

He never once saw the foot of Volcano.It was hard to say whether the large man meant to trip him or not.

But either way, the effect was lethal.Bart's flailing fingertips came so near the fletchings that he could literally feel the air molecules being displaced by the arrow's wake.They came that near, and still fell short.Bart Allen sprawled to the floor, not even protecting himself from the fall.His chin cracked hard into the tile, and he tasted blood.

By the time he could pick himself up again, it was far too late.

* * *

"Aww, _crud._"

Cissie saw the arrow coming for her, and had already started to move, but even as she did, she knew she'd never get out of the way in time.It was Harm all over again, she thought, only this time, there was no such thing as a flesh wound.She knew her arrows; the liquid nitrogen arrows were different than her cryo-arrows— which were fairly harmless, in their own way.These would coat an area in enough liquid nitrogen to crystallize a Cadillac.

Time seemed to slow down; everything came into sudden and crystal-clear focus around her, and it was at that moment that Cissie King-Jones realized she wasn't going to escape.This was it.The end.The last chapter.

In the split second she had to catalogue her short life, she heard Bart scream "No!" in a voice that sounded like a badly warped tape.He made a stab for the arrow, his fingers falling breathtakingly short before he tripped and slammed to the floor.

_Figures.Everyone else has a knight in shining armor.My hero trips over his feet on the way to my rescue.Where the hell's the justice in that?_

If that had been her last thought on earth, Arrowette would have felt righteously shafted by life in general.In fact, she might have stalked right up to the powers that be in the afterlife and lodged a formal complaint that of all the heroes on earth, she had to have one of the absolute worst closing lines to a life that anyone had ever had.And Arrowette was someone who had yelled down the JLA— who were only a step below God to begin with— so her opinion was not one to take lightly.

But as it turned out, that was sort of a moot point.

_I really fucking hate you, mom, _she thought.

And then the arrow hit her and its delicate arrowhead shattered and in an instant there was nothingness.


	2. Requiem

TWO – A Requiem

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

Disclaimer: All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.I am not making any profit from their use.This copyrighted telecast is intended for the private use of our audience. Any rebroadcast or retransmission, without the express written consent of the Philadelphia Phillies and Major League Baseball, is prohibited.

Jeez, where did _that _come from?

Author Notes: Yes, you can feel free to put my name on a dartboard and peg it a few times for killing off Cissie.I'm evil.I live for it.Oh, and a major note: this would be mostly where that PG-13 rating kicks in, boys and girls.Sorry about that.If I blow continuity for some of the stuff I do here, I'll live with it.

* * * * *

TWO – Requiem

"Halon."Tim said tonelessly, and then ran his hands through his dark hair once before resting the fingers again at his temples.He had scarcely looked up from the tile floor, as if he were afraid to meet the listener's eyes.

But the listener knew better.It wasn't fear that caused Tim Drake to look at the floor, recite his answers in a dead voice.The listener had endured enough pain, seen enough anguish etched into the faces of countless people.He recognized it instantly.Nonetheless, he prodded, pretending that his mind had been elsewhere.

"Pardon?"He said.As a point of fact, he had heard the word clearly.But he wanted to see if Tim would just repeat the word in that same flat, lifeless tone of voice, or dig a bit deeper.

Whether he meant to or not, the young man bit the hook.

"Halon.The stuff they put in fire extinguishers.Flame-retardant.Heat resistant."He never looked up, just continued on, as though reciting it from memory."I should have thought of it earlier.I know that.But I didn't... not until... until she was already— "

He couldn't go on for a long moment.One hand peeled away the spirit-gummed green mask and dropped it to the floor, then pinched at the bridge of his nose, snuffing out the tears as they were born.

"Go on."The listener said, his voice uncharacteristically soft, tinged with understanding.

As if those words had caused a crack to form in the dam of his emotions, Tim's eyes gained a little flare of their fire back."What's there to 'go on' about?We did what we could, considering he'd already taken out the entire damned sprinkler system!There!I admit it!I screwed up again!I should have noticed he'd cut off the power to the sprinklers, and if I did, I might have thought of using Halon sooner!"

He stood up from his chair now, blinking back tears that the listener knew were not just angry or sorrowful, but a painful mix of the two."All right?I admit it!Are you happy now?Robin screwed up and one of his teammates paid the ultimate damned price for it!Are you _happy?_"

"I'm not interested in who's at fault, Tim."He picked up the mask from the floor."I just wanted to know what happened."

"She _died!That's _what happened!I told her to use a liquid nitrogen arrow, and the guy caught and threw it back, and it hit her in the shoulder and _she froze solid and died!_"Tim pressed his fist up against the window and leaned on it, as though he wished he could punch the glass out and throw himself through it.The stars in the black sky beyond flared steadily, and as if the dim light calmed him somewhat, he slowly gathered himself again, momentarily."We rounded up what hand-held extinguishers we could, hosed him down and— "

His hand found his eyes again, came away wet; slender tracks of tears formed on the fingertips of the green gloves."Jesus, God, can't any of you do anything?"

The listener slowly shook his head."I wish we could, Tim.But we're people, not gods."

"That's not what the media says."Tim said.Except for the choke, it was a flat tone.

"If the media has any better luck raising the dead, I'll be more inclined to listen to them."

Tim stared at the floor, caught again between anger and sorrow.

The listener tried a different tack."You took down a dangerous criminal, Tim.One more powerful than I imagine any of you are used to tackling.You told us what happened as soon as you could and brought her here as quickly as humanly possible.Nobody is going to say that you didn't do everything you could do."

"Cold comfort."Tim whispered.

"I know.This will likely be, too.She didn't suffer."He held out the mask to Tim."The human body's not meant to take that sudden extreme; even if she hadn't crystallized, the shock—"

Tim held up a hand, as though warding him— and the mask— away."Bruce, please.That really doesn't matter.Not now.I just... I need some time away, just to think.I don't need to be Robin.I just need to be Tim, someone who just lost a good friend."

"In the line of duty."He responded, quietly, and after a moment, made his way around Tim and pressed the mask into his hand.

Tim stared at him, stonily, and slowly adhered the mask to his face.Then he made his way toward the door, which hissed open at his approach."The how doesn't really matter to me.The fact we lost her is enough."

"Robin."Batman said, and the old dark voice was back.Grief had its time and place, but it wouldn't do in lieu of answers."What about the rest of Young Justice?"

Robin looked at him for a long moment, and then looked out into the hallway."As of this moment, Bruce, there no longer is a Young Justice."

And then he stepped out, and the door hissed shut behind him, leaving Batman to the solitude of his thoughts in the observatory of the Justice League Watchtower.

* * *

"I can't believe this."Cassandra Sandsmark said, in a voice just above a whisper.It was hard to tell if she just didn't trust her voice or if a whisper was all she was capable of speaking— these were the first coherent words she had spoken in some time.The dark wig had been discarded some time ago, forgotten, and her short sandy-blonde hair was still in slight disarray.Somewhere along the line, she'd lost one of her kneepads, and there were still burn marks on the stylized gold W's of shirt.Her eyes had dried now, mostly— smudged trails of dirt marred her cheeks, but no new tears had sprung to the surface yet.

That probably made sense, Kon-El supposed.It had been a few hours since they arrived on the Watchtower; it was possible she just didn't have any tears left.After a while, he figured, it was like trying to wring water out of a damp washcloth.Sometimes there just isn't any wetness left to squeeze out.

Or words left to voice, for that matter.That was what Kon himself was going through as they sat on the couch of the nondescript waiting room.He wasn't sure what to say, if anything, and everything he did say came out wrong or sounded lame.It was like he was picking and choosing from a mass of overused condolences.

"I still can't believe... Kon, it's... it's just not fair."Cassie said, brokenly.He could tell she was trying to be strong, trying to focus on something other than the hurt.But when she did, she kept looking through the doorway into the next room, her eyes transfixing on the reflection of the overhead lights off the glass tube on the far wall.On what lay— or more correctly, stood— behind the glass.And that just kept the wounds raw.

"I know, Cassie.I know."Kon said, and inwardly grimaced at how automatic those words sounded._Boy, you're a fountain of trite comfort, aren't you?_He cursed himself silently.

"You _don't know!_It's _not_ fair!"She repeated, and although her voice raised from the whisper, it was bitter and edged, as well."Look at her!She was my best friend!And now she's— she's like that!I don't know what to think, I don't know what to do, Kon, my best friend is dead, frozen, _whatever! _Hera, they can't even take her out of that case!" 

Kon-El struggled to find words.He held her close, patted her back softly, knowing no matter what he said, it would be inadequate."Cass... Cissie wouldn't want you to beat yourself up like this."

"She wouldn't want to be frozen solid, either!"

"Wondy," he started.

But she didn't listen; her voice raised, almost hysterical."What're we gonna do, keep her in a meat locker so she doesn't _melt?_"

And she stopped, her eyes widening.The silence that fell over the room was oppressive, broken only by the hiss and thrum of the refrigeration unit through the open doorway.

"Oh, oh Hera." Cassie whispered.She seemed to crumple from the inside, heartsick at what she'd just said.And from somewhere, she managed to find enough tears for her blue eyes to glimmer as she slowly hugged him again, burrowing deep into his arms."I'm sorry, Kon.I— I can't think straight right now.It's just all so insane.I never thought anything like this would ever happen."

Kon nodded."I know.Neither did I."

"Has anyone told her mother yet?"

"I'll handle that," said a soft voice from the shadows of the hallway as Kon opened his mouth to respond.He and Cassie turned to the opposite doorway to see the familiar red, yellow and green uniform of Robin."It's the least I can do.I'm the team leader.It's my responsibility."

"Robin?"Superboy said, not because he didn't see the Boy Wonder, but because there was something odd about the voice.Something missing.Confidence.Self-assuredness.He looked again, and saw the way Robin was leaning against the wall, tiredly, as though his shoulders were weighed down.

For the first time since they'd formed Young Justice, Kon-El saw beyond the green mask and the Dark Knight façade, and saw that Robin wasn't all that different from him.He saw that there was a deep pain, a sense of failure and mortality that the mask couldn't hide any longer.He saw a teen that felt very small and alone after the events of the past few hours.He saw all that, and felt an odd surge of camaraderie.

It was then that Robin stepped from the shadows and removed his mask, then slowly offered his gloved hand to Kon and Cassie for the first time, unmasked, not as a leader or a co-worker, but as a friend.

"Not Robin."He said with a small, somewhat embarrassed smile."Tim."

* * *

In the next room, she didn't move, didn't blink, didn't breathe.It was like it wasn't really her, but an image of her.A still life.But life had nothing to do with it; at least, that's what he'd been told.

The overhead lights were dimmed in the safe room, but the refrigerated stasis cylinder that held Arrowette was lighted from inside, casting an odd, almost ethereal glow over her.The inside light and the flicker of the tube's electronic displays softly illuminated the darkness of the room, and inside the cylinder it sparkled on the facets of ice and the crystals of frost— lending to the appearance that her body was made of crystal.It was ironic, as that just made her look all that much more fragile, just like her life was.

Such thoughts were beyond Bart Allen right now.Many thoughts were, and it wasn't just because his thoughts bypassed words and curled straight into images.Now, those images even seemed to escape him; he couldn't talk, couldn't think— he wasn't sure he knew how anymore.He was numb, barely able to even move, a mirror of his teammate behind the glass.He hadn't budged from the spot, kneeling in front of the tube with his mask pulled down around his neck, almost since they'd arrived on the Watchtower.

He'd lost track of everything else around him.For that matter, he hadn't even realized he'd been crying, off and on, until each time the bluish form of Cissie went out of focus as his vision blurred, and he'd been forced to stab his fingers to his eyes and rub away the wetness.

It couldn't be like this, he found himself whispering aloud.He'd never understood, never realized...

"Bart?"A soft, wispy voice asked, behind him.He recognized the voice— Suzie, he knew; the young heroine known as Secret— but couldn't pull his eyes away to look at her.

She didn't force him to, floating around him so that his peripheral vision picked up her face, drifting within the clouds of sand-colored smoke that made up her body.She waited there, momentarily, and then, in a much softer voice, asked again:

"Bart?"

"Hey, Suzie."Bart said, without really looking.He realized that his voice didn't sound right.It sounded small and flat and nothing at all like the Bart Allen the heard talk every day.

She seemed hesitant to say anything beyond that, and out of the side of his eyes, he could see her look up at Cissie as well.Then she glanced back at him.

"Do... do you want to talk?"Secret asked.

His eyes had remained steadfastly locked on Cissie's face, but Suzie's words broke the spell, and he blinked his wide amber eyes and turned at her.For a long time, he just stared, trying to form words, and his mouth moved a couple times, noiselessly, before he admitted in that same small voice:

"I don't know what to say."

He saw for the first time that Suzie's own eyes had welled up with tears, and he dimly realized that he never knew that she could cry, too.But she touched his shoulder, a touch so feather-light that he wasn't sure at first he'd actually felt it, and her lips turned up slightly in a sad smile.

"I don't always, either, Bart.There's no reason to feel bad about it."She said, and then she looked back at the stasis cylinder.She hugged herself, and Bart saw her shiver slightly, as though feeling some remembered pain.But she turned her head to him, sky-blue eyes still glistening, and she swallowed."But at a time like this, Bart, we need to talk, to remind each other we're not alone.Being alone is the worst feeling in the world."

Bart's eyes closed, and he thought of Cissie, smiling, warm.Alive."I already feel alone."

He opened his eyes, to find that Suzie had floated around him.Smoke rose from her, wafted around him. Her face was still etched with sadness, but her voice didn't lose its composure, like his had."But you're not.We're all here.We all feel it.That's why it might help if you talk, to remember.Maybe if I start, it'll help you know what to say.Would that be okay?"

He shrugged noncommittally, and his head drooped into a nod.He didn't really feel like arguing.He didn't feel like doing much, in fact."Yeah."

"Okay, you know my name— Suzie— right?I didn't have a name, really, before I met all of you."

"Yeah."He paused, gazing at the stasis cylinder, and quietly added, "Cissie gave you that name."

"She did."She wafted around him again, floated to his side, and kneeled on the floor beside him."I told her that I would be honored to accept a name that she had given to me so freely."

"I remember," he murmured.

"I'm still very honored by it.But it's more than that to me, now...It's almost... like a part of her that will continue.That doesn't mean I'm not sad, Bart.It doesn't mean I'm not feeling pain inside, because I do.I do, more than you might guess."She touched a hand to her chest, and her eyes became soft."But at least, as long as I have that name, I won't ever be far from her... because I can't even say it without remembering her."

"But we shouldn't _be_ just remembering her!Not like this!Not if it means she's not _here!_"Bart's voice rose in pitch, and he looked up, disconsolately.The blinking of blue LED flickered off Cissie's long, crystalline hair, off her face, her arms.And the sight took all the frustration and anger out of him, leaving only a deep, lasting hurt."We should be talking with her, hanging out with her, having fun with her.She... she shouldn't be like this.Not when..."

He trailed off.

Suzie watched him, quietly, and then prompted."Not when...?"

"S'nothin'."He said, a small murmur.

"Are you sure?"Secret asked skeptically.

He didn't answer that.

She let the quiet linger there, untouched, and slowly she tried again."It doesn't look like it's 'nothing' to you.I can understand if you don't want to tell me, Bart.But I'd kind of like to know.I mean, I... I didn't really get to know her, not like you did.We talked a little, but... I don't know... other than my name, I never got a chance to find out much."

He was silent for some time, and his gaze never broke from Cissie."I never told her how I feel."

She was shocked, or at least, she didn't respond for a few moments.But then the soft voice came to him again, questioning.

"How you feel?"

Bart nodded a couple times, sending a tumble of untamed brown hair down past his eyes.It didn't matter.He'd seen his vision blur again, and couldn't force himself to knuckle away the tears."I just didn't... didn't know... she was right all along."

He felt a light touch on his face, like fog on a morning breeze, and his vision focused on Suzie, her fingers brushing away the wetness, looking at him with quiet sky-blue eyes, an expression of shared sadness on her barely-there face.Her voice was as soft, almost apologetic.

"Will you tell me?"

Bart found his voice again."Tell you?"

"What you mean by that.She was right all along.About what?"She drew her hand back from him, inclined her head, ever so slightly, sending up a small wisp of smoke at the movement. "Will you tell me?"

Bart glanced back up at the glass of the cylinder, at Cissie.And then his gaze dropped back to Suzie, and he looked her for a long moment, saw the honest desire to know in those cloudy eyes.He swallowed, as if he hadn't taken a drink in months.

And then, there, in the quiet of the safe room, kneeling before their departed teammate, Bart Allen told her how he'd come to realize he'd fallen in love.


	3. Remembrance

THREE – Remembrance

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

Disclaimer: All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.I am not making any profit from their use.And as a personal note, please remember that if you think your characters are being used for a profit without permission, maybe you should visit the law offices of Hutt, Hutz and Heike, personal injury and small-claims lawyers, where our motto is, "We never met a lawsuit from which we wouldn't try to get money."

Author Notes:Thanks for all the great reviews of the first two chapters, guys and gals!Hope you are happy with what comes after that!But after the last chapter, I figured you all probably need a little brightness, if not the long-windedness... this is quite a bit longer than either of the first two parts, but there's a crapload of stuff to fit in.

You also may or may not recognize a few of the flashback sequences in this little spark of Bart's memory (tell me if they're a little hard to follow).Most of them come from my sordid head, but at least one comes from actual continuity.Most specifically, Cissie/Bart aficionados will probably recognize a bit from Young Justice #12.See, I actually do read _something, _here and there. 

And now we return you to the story at large.

* * * * *

THREE – Remembrance

_Elsewhen..._

There really _was _no other term for it, other than that.

Vanishing Point wasn't so much of a place or a time as it was removed from both.Originally a laboratory belonging to Matthew Ryder, it had been transported outside of realtime, outside of realspace.

It had been remarkably fortunate that the lab found its way there, however, because the only way its occupants could work properly was outside the framework of time and space.Vanishing Point had become home to those that monitored the timestream, who policed and recorded Earth's history from the beginning of time to its end.

It was the headquarters, so to speak, of the Linear Men.

Rip Hunter was one of them— a temporal mechanic, a time-cop, a person pledged to preserve the timestream from outside influence.Ordinarily.

Now, however, at this time— subjectively speaking— he was doing something that made him stand out a little from the others he worked with.He wasn't flickering.He wasn't strobing.He wasn't doing any of that because for one of the few times since his life began anew as a Linear Man, Hunter wasn't studying the timestream from within it.He was stable— at least as stable as one got at Vanishing Point.

But that didn't mean he was just relaxing.He took a Styrofoam cup of coffee— a mental joke about how long it took Styrofoam to decompose ran through his head as he glanced at it— and stepped into the main lab, looking around.As usual, the lab was a scene of controlled chaos.Images of Matthew Ryder, the alternate timeline Ryder named Waverider, and the group researcher Liri Lee flickered into and out of existence all around him.

"Pardon, Hunter.But we have a situation," said the Matthew Ryder of thirty-seven minutes in the future.(Subjectively, of course.Time was at best relative here at Vanishing Point.)He stepped around Hunter and checked something on a vid-display, then flickered back out.

"No problem."Hunter smiled thinly as five more variations of Ryder, two of Waverider and three of Liri Lee strobed around him, talking all at once.He made his way through the lot of them to his workstation, taking small sips of his coffee, and made a face as he sat down.You'd think temporal researchers could find a time and place to import a proper brew.

And maybe aspirin, too, for that matter, he thought as he began to listen to the rapid-fire verbal exchanges of his strobing teammates.A lot of it was hard to follow— conversations were held out of synch with the normal flow of time, or sentences were started by one Linear Man who flickered out of Vanishing Point, only to have his sentence picked right up and finished by another.But even so, Hunter heard words like 'quantum spike' and 'temporal ripple' bandied about, and they immediately grabbed his attention.

He flipped on his workstation, and began to call up the data on the situation.At first, the monitor was nearly blank; a few lines of text hung, secluded, at the top of the screen.But then, a new line followed, then another, and another, all from seemingly out of nowhere.Hunter allowed a small smile to form as more and more data fabricated on his display, filling it until it began to scroll.One of the wonders about traveling through time was seeing reports appearing to input themselves as they were entered in the system in the past and came into being in the now.His eyes followed the scrolling data for a few seconds as he sipped again at his coffee, and the more he read, the more his eyes narrowed.

"These reports don't show me anything."Hunter said."Liri?Do you have more information on this situation?"

It was the Liri Lee of ninety-six seconds ago that responded, remaining stable just long enough to begin to answer."We were searching the timestream and found some anomalous data.We think it may be— "

An alternate image, the Liri Lee of sixteen minutes from now, continued as her sister image disappeared back into the ethers."—the beginning of a spike, Hunter.Matthew, Waverider and I are monitoring, trying to find the origin point, but so far— "

She flickered out, her statement finished by Liri Lee, plus two hours."—we haven't had any luck.We're logging our findings."

Hunter's brow creased, and he went back to searching the data.Chronologically, the anomaly seemed to chart a small course, but as often happened, the ripple of a variance in time frequently extended outward, into the future.Ripples like that were often dangerous.They corrupted the timelines, skewed the histories and the futures.The Linear Men had all witnessed that sort of thing often enough— from what many had dubbed the 'Crisis' and 'Zero Hour', to when Gog had traversed back along Superman's timeline and begun killing him at progressively earlier points in his history.

But there was an odd feeling about this... this spike, for lack of a better term.Hunter couldn't tell what it was about it that made him feel odd, or whether it was a good sort of odd or a bad sort.He just didn't know, not yet.So for now, he chose to continue looking over the data as it appeared on-screen, contemplating. 

Whatever it was, the Linear Men would find out soon.

Subjectively speaking, of course.

* * *

"Red Torando's holding conference with the rest of the... ah... adults.I don't think any of them hold anyone at fault, above and beyond Volcano.He'll eventually be held by the authorities, possibly even tried for murder.But the JLA doesn't even know if that'll stick.It was just... an accident, that's all."Robin said, and sat down on the chair, rubbing at the bridge of his nose as though trying to rid himself of the last few remnants of spirit gum.He looked up at Superboy and Wonder Girl.

The two just gawked at him.On top of everything else that had happened, Robin suddenly unmasking and telling them his name was apparently enough to send them both into a state of stupor.The handshake Superboy had given him had been almost nerveless.

"You know, it won't kill you to blink," he remarked to them.

Kon finally found his voice first."Tim?"

Robin smiled thinly, and nodded.A first name by itself, after all, wasn't spilling too much.Bruce might ream him later, but Tim was starting to consider that maybe Robin wouldn't be around too much longer, anyway."I thought maybe it was overdue."

"But you never... before now, I mean," Superboy stammered, gathering himself slowly."Why now?"

"I guess times like this change people."Tim said.He glanced through the doorway."And Cissie deserves to have a person here, remembering her, not a mask."

Cassie slowly nodded.It was apparent she was having a hard time with words.

Tim's gaze never left the stasis cylinder, though.He'd noticed the other pair of young heroes sitting there in front of the starkly lit form of their teammate.Smoke rolled off— _from, _he reminded himself— Secret, from her uniform, from her hair.He could see, reflected in the dim light, the sparkle of tears on her cheeks.His heart softened at the emotion etched on her face— emotion he knew was mirrored on every face here.

Next to her was Bart.His back was to the doorway, the tilt of his head making only his big billow of brown hair visible as he looked up at the young woman behind the glass.Every so often his fingers touched the glass, trailed down.

Other than that, he barely moved.And for that matter, he didn't look like he was showing inclination to move.Had it been anyone else, Time wouldn't have given it a second thought.It was obviously an emotional moment, after all.But this was Bart.This was _Impulse._Then he thought it through.He's likely beating himself mentally.Just like all of us— no, maybe more.He was a fingertip away from saving her, after all.

"How long has he been in there like that?"Tim asked, quietly.

Cassie followed his gaze.Her lower lip trembled before she bit on it."Uhm.Since she was brought up here." 

"Oh, man.Really?"Tim couldn't remember him ever staying that still without being told to, even for a few moments.And he hadn't moved for four solid hours?He wondered if they'd ever know the happy-go-lucky Bart they knew before today.

Kon nodded."I thought about going in to talk to him, get him to open up..."

"It looks like Secret's handling that pretty well." Tim said quietly, feeling a small, tempered surge of warmth.He could imagine the young heroine prying Bart out of his shell with little more than an innocent question and a soft, well-meaning smile."He probably blames himself, like I'm sure we all do.Maybe even more, because he was so close to catching the arrow.It may take him a long while to come to terms with that.I don't know how often Bart's had to deal with something like this.

"And on top of that, I gather she was a really close friend to him, too."Tim remembered the first time he'd seen Arrowette, when Red Tornado had informed them she'd been brought to the Justice Cave after Harm had wounded her.She'd mentioned knowing Impulse then, but he had no idea how close they'd been—

Cassie's face drained of color.She looked pallid, as though he'd called some forgotten piece of information to her mind, and then she sat down hard on the couch again, her eyes glimmering and fixated on the stasis cylinder.

Tim looked at Cassie, his eyebrows raising in concern and confusion.Kon looked at her with a worried gaze as well."Cass?What is it?"

"Oh.Nothing.Uhm.Yeah," she said, as if from a great distance away."Close friend.Something like that."

* * *

"I didn't know it at the time," Bart confessed to Suzie.He didn't really know where the words were coming from; he just knew something inside him was urging them to come, even though they stumbled over one another."I really didn't. Mostly 'cause I never really paid too much attention, I guess.

"But I mean, to me, girls were always just... well, girls.I mean, some of them were... I dunno... cooler to be with, like you and Cassie and Carol, 'cause you like cool stuff, like video games and comic books, but you're still girls."He glanced at her."Uhm.No offense or anything, I mean."

Suzie smiled."It's okay."

He looked back up at the frozen archer."But Cissie was... she was different somehow.Not a bad different, just a _different _different.She was the first girl that I could hang around with whether I had my mask on or not.It was like... well... like I didn't have to keep secrets around her.We had things in common.Her mom was really kinda pushy... and well, that's sort of what I thought Max was like, too.And we both liked pizza and the mall and swimming and some cool TV shows and even though she was okay with Hanson I didn't hold it against her or anything.So we talked about that kinda stuff a lot.

"So, anyway, that was what I thought it was.It was just a little cooler to be with Cissie, because we just could connect like that.But the more time that went on, and the more we hung out, I wasn't sure it was just that."He took a breath."It just felt different, somehow.But I didn't realize what it was until she told me."

His eyes drew a slow line over the glass up to her face, the wide, surprised eyes, the ever-so slightly turned up nose.He couldn't look at that face without feeling a piercing feeling in midsection, a burning sensation in the pit of his stomach, like all of a sudden his insides had become ash.And when he looked away, the feeling still lingered.

But when he looked at her all that came to mind was the thought that she'd never talk to him again, that they'd never go to the movies or anything, that he'd never be able to tell her that she made him feel good just by being there.She was gone now.Cissie was gone.And it just wasn't _right._

There was something far deeper than just the shock and the regret, though.Bart's experiences with death might have been limited, but he'd never felt that heated stab to his heart when the once-retired speedster Johnny Quick joined the Speed Force when they'd fought Savitar.Maybe it was because Johnny didn't leave a body as a constant reminder, he thought.

Or maybe it was because he was never so close— a space smaller than he knew how to measure— to saving Johnny.He could still feel the shifting of air molecules on his fingertips as the feathers of her arrow stayed _just that far _out of reach.He could still _feel_ the air move as he missed the catch, even though his fingertips rested on the cool glass. 

"What did she tell you?"Secret asked, after a moment, apparently not wanting to interrupt.

Bart looked from the glass to her and smiled a bit— although in truth he didn't feel like it.He wasn't sure what was causing him to feel bad, be angry at himself, angry at things he had no control over.So after a moment, he continued talking, remembering, trying to sort out his feelings, just as he did when she was still alive.

"She told me..."

* * *

_"Bart... I love you!"_

It was stupid to dwell on it, he knew.Stupid.Pointless.Not cool.Probably wayyyy not cool.

But he couldn't help it, either.After the whole Disco-Hell thing, when they'd attacked Leesburg— after the team had gone its separate ways and Cissie went back to the Elias school— he figured it would just disappear out of his head, like a lot of stuff did.But it just wouldn't stay gone, even though he tried to force it to.

He'd tried to get his mind back on school and the slow crawl of Manchester, Alabama.He tried to painfully absorb the daily lessons of life provided by Max Mercury, the Zen Master Of Sitting On The Couch And Talking In Vague Terms About Things That Have Nothing To Do With Speed.He'd tried hanging with his friends, everyone from Carol and Preston to Superboy and Robin.

But nothing seemed to pry it out of his mind for long.Not even when Superboy tried to show him the finer points of rap, a conversation that completely lost Bart about twenty-five words in.Every time Kon would be talking— about how misunderstood Bad Master Ice Throwdown was in his controversial CD, about how the lyrics weren't just about 'bad' themes, about how the bass-line really was groundbreaking, or whatever— Bart would nod knowledgably and hear that voice in the back of his head, or even worse, see her saying it with that same appealing smile:

_"Bart... I love you!I've always loved you!"_

"You aren't even listening, are you, Imp?"Kon asked, raising an eyebrow above the rim of his rounded sunglasses.He probably didn't need them, except for the brightness of the artificial lights in what Young Justice had come to call the pool room.The two had set up by the natural underground pond in the back caverns of the Justice Cave, after being kicked out of the main meeting room by Robin when he'd heard a few of the choice expletives in the lyrics.

"Huh?Oh, sure I was, Kon."Bart blinked a couple times, and chucked a thumb back toward the speakers of portable CD player, which were shaking with the deep thrum of bass."You were just saying that this song by Band Master Ice Showdown—"

"Bad Master Ice Throwdown."Kon interrupted.

"—Yeah, him.Anyway, you said this song was..."Bart slowly trailed off and reddened, realizing he had no clue what Kon had just said about it. 

"It was...?"Kon prodded.

"—uhm.Nice?"Bart responded lamely.

"Nice?"Kon let out an exasperated growl as he rubbed his fingers over his eyes."I don't even know why I try anymore.You're not much into it, I guess?"

"Into it?"Bart asked, and then shrugged."It's... uhm... all right, I guess.It's just... There's a bunch of stuff on my mind, Kon.It's been hard for me to focus, you know?"

"Stuff on your mind?You?"Kon raised the sunglasses again, and looked at Bart as though the speedster had suddenly grown a third eye."Like what?"

_"Bart... I love you!I've always loved you!Tell me it's how you feel too!"_

"Just... stuff."Bart shook his head, trying to get the words out of his head.Wayyyy not cool.He took a deep breath."Kon, can I ask you a question?"

Kon turned down the volume on the CD player to just below the level of airplane engines."Sure, Bart.Shoot."

"Well, see..."Bart was embarrassed to find he had no idea where to begin.He felt the blood rush to his face."I've just... you know... I've been having these weird thoughts, and it seems like my mind has been really stuck on something—"

"Oh, please tell me you're kidding," said a decidedly feminine voice— the very same one that had been running through Bart's head the last few weeks.He and Kon both whirled toward the entrance to the cave, startled to see Cissie and Cassie there, both sporting stylish two-piece swimsuits.Cassie, for reasons Bart would never be able to understand, was still wearing her black wig, even though her powder blue swimsuit didn't look a thing like her uniform.Cissie, on the other hand, was wearing a red and white suit and had a towel thrown casually over one shoulder that fell about to where her skirt usually did.

And she was... she was... she was...

Bart shook his head.What was wrong with him?Why did he keep coming up with words like _pretty_ and _breathtaking _and _nice-looking?_He wasn't supposed to be thinking of her like that, was he?This was _Cissie. _Arrowette.She was, well, a friend, right?Friends didn't think of friends like that, did they?At least, not that he knew.He knew he'd definitely look at Kon funny if Kon let it get around he thought Bart was breathtaking.But he couldn't stop gawking at her, even though he knew she was just a friend.

Fortunately, Kon seemed to have other things on his mind and didn't notice.

"Well, hellllooooo, ladies, come here to hear the mean bass of m'man Bad Master and take a dip?"Kon grinned knowingly as he nudged Bart, who was still— truth to tell— more than a bit slack-jawed at the way his brain was working.Kon's tone dropped to a mutter."Yo, Imp, at least you can say hi, huh?"

"Bllglphh."Bart mumbled, waving at them.His head was starting to hurt.

For their part, the two girls appeared not to notice.Cassie was pink-faced and murmuring a hello to Kon that Bart could barely hear over the thud of bass from the speakers.Cissie was a bit more resolute, striding into the cavern and setting her towel down by the poolside, before returning the hello.But as she listened to the music, she raised a blonde eyebrow at the two and put a hand on one hip.Bart had seen Cissie's pose before.She was half a step from tapping her foot.

"Well, you're half-right, Kon."She said."We did come here for a swim.But I'd kinda prefer to listen to something else, if you don't mind."

Kon's eyes widened.He looked like he'd been slapped across the face."Whaaat?What's the matter with Bad Master Ice Showdown?"

"For one thing, I'd like to be able to hear myself think over thumping bass," Cissie said diplomatically."And if we're out of uniform, I could use a little time away from mindless violence and profanity.Even in music lyrics."

Kon spread his hands."Cissie, his music's about growing up on the mean streets.Ya gotta expect a little violence with that, you know?It's what separates him from the posers!"

"Well, sorry."She glanced at Cassie, settled into a bit of a smirk."Does he sing anything romantic?"

"Yeah!He really loves his gun in _Kill Dat Sucka._He treats loading it with hollow-points like he's kissing it."

Cissie looked momentarily ill."Uhm.No thanks.Really, Cassie and I want to listen to something else.Right Cass?"

Wonder Girl stopped at poolside, looking like she was caught between staring at both Cissie and Kon with a wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights look.She stammered."Uhm... well... I mean..."

"Well that's tough.Me and Bart want to listen to this, and we were here first.Right Ba— "

Whatever Bart did, he must have done by instinct, because in one moment he was gawking and wondering why his brain was so caught up in weird thoughts, and the next he had zipped into the rec room and back, coming to a stop in front of Cissie, by the pool, holding up a stack of CD's as high as his head in front of her and grinning like an idiot.He stared at her from around the stack.

"—rt?"Kon finished, looking at the blank space Bart had been just a moment before, and then he settled into a low growl."Awright, awright!Just no sugar-pop boy bands, _please!_"

Cassie winced.Something romantic by the Frontstreet Boys or 360° probably wasn't forthcoming.

"Wouldja like to pick something else, Cissie?"Bart said.It must have been reflexive— he was sure his mind wasn't capable of thinking enough to say anything constructive. 

"Thanks, Bart..." Cissie looked at him.Her blue eyes seemed to sparkle with warmth and her face lit right up into a beaming and very promising smile as she plucked out the third case from the top.Her eyes found his again, and the smile became even brighter, if it was possible."I love you!"

_"Bart... I love you!I've always loved you!Tell me it's how you feel too!"_

"Gyahhh!"Bart's eyes widened, and he lost hold on the stack of the CD's.He reflexively took a step backward— which seemed like a really good idea until he realized he'd been standing on the edge of the underground pool.His mind was so addled that he didn't even attempt to catch himself until he was already three feet underwater.

"...eez, Ciss.What did you do, push him?"Kon was saying as he surfaced.The Boy of Steel had pulled his shades down to glance at the sputtering speedster.

"_No!_No, I didn't push him or anything," Cissie said, staring at Bart with wide blue eyes, holding her forefinger to her lips."I just said, 'Thanks, Bart... I'd love to.'And then..."

"He just... freaked or something."Cassie said.

"Probably 'cause he saw you pulled out a Hanson CD."Kon said, gesturing to the jewel case in Cissie's hand.Cissie just swung a glare to him.

Cassie knelt by the side of the pool and reached out a hand toward him."You okay, Bart?"

Bart's head was still partially submerged, so his response was merely a rush of bubbles.It was probably better off that way.

* * *

Suzie restrained a giggle, but only because it didn't seem the time or the place for it.Curls of smoke ringed around her gently smiling face, around her big sky-blue eyes, as her shoulders shook with suppressed laughter.

"Oh, Bart... You really weren't that confused by it, were you?"

Bart kept looking at Cissie's frozen face, and for a long moment, it was like he didn't hear her._It's not fair.It's not right.She should still be smiling, like she did that day at the pool._

Then, slowly, he dropped his gaze, and looked at Secret, nodding."For a while, yeah.I was.I mean... I'd never felt anything like it.I didn't know what was going on in my head.I couldn't understand why it wasn't just like it always was with Cissie.I couldn't understand why I would look at her and just lose control of my mouth and say things like 'gglllbh.'I couldn't figure out why I was reliving those same words, over and over.I never did that before with her."He sighed, softly."I wish I'd have understood faster."

"I'm sorry, Bart."Secret glanced up at Cissie and then back at Bart."So you didn't even understand that you... you cared about her like that?That must have been horrible.What did you do?"

"I... did something that confused me even more at first."Bart felt a small smile slip to his face."But it turned out to be the right thing."

"What was that?"

"I asked around for advice."

* * *

"Max, will you tell me about girls?"Bart asked, over breakfast.

That pretty much brought a sudden and abrupt stop to the morning routine at the Crandall household.Helen nearly spit out her morning coffee, and took the opportunity to hightail it out of the kitchen and probably lock herself in her room.Max looked at Bart for a long time with a fork of eggs midway to his open mouth.And then he set the fork down, his jaw twitching slightly, and he re-adjusted his reading glasses, gathering that composed expression he always seemed to have.Never let it be said that Max Mercury— the Zen Master of Speed— would long be thrown by anything.

"Of course I will..."Max said, and then glanced back down at the morning paper."...When you're thirty or I'm dead.Whichever comes first."

"What kind of answer is that?"Bart crossed his arms and glared."What if I need to know now?"

"Trust me, you don't."Max said, finishing the _Details _section and folding the paper methodically, then glancing back at Bart."They'll tell you about that in Health Class."

Bart stared down into the pinkish milk of his cereal bowl.A few soggy Fruit Bombs still floated there, sulkily."You mean, I'll learn about why I keep hearing her say those words in my head and stuff?"

"Well, probab— "Max looked at him."Who her?What words?"

_"Bart... I love you!I've always loved you!Tell me it's how you feel too!"_

"Uhm.S'not important, I guess."Bart said, swirling his milk around with one finger and resting his chin on his other hand.

"Bart..."Max began in what Bart had started calling his 'careful' voice.The one that he used as though he was going to break something by talking to fast or loud."What exactly would make you bring something like this up?"

"Well..." Bart glanced up at him."I can tell you anything, right?"

"Of course."

"I think I'm in love."Bart sighed, morosely.Her face kept popping into his head at all the wrong times.Her voice kept hitting the edge of his thoughts."But I don't know for sure.And if I am, I don't know what to do."

"And…?"Max said, carefully.

"What do you mean, 'And?'"Bart lifted his head, his voice becoming incredulous."Isn't that enough?How do I know?What do I do?How do I find out if Ci— if she feels the same way?"

Max looked at him for a long time."This has nothing to do with sex, does it?"

Bart stared at him, blankly."With what?"

"Oh, thank you, God."Max murmured, dropping his face to his hand.Then he raised his eyes and took a deep breath.Bart watched him intently, as Max seemed to be ready to talk three separate times, only to rethink it and clamp his jaw shut each time.Finally, he did open his mouth and actually had something other than a spit-take come out.

"Bart," he began, in that careful tone."Love... is sort of a delicate matter.It's not necessarily something anyone—including me— can give you clear-cut advice on."

"I know.That's what Wally said."

"He's probably— "His brows flew up."Wait.You've talked to Wally already?"

"Well..."Bart glanced down into his bowl."Uhm... yeah.But it did sort of make sense.He's always talking about Linda, and... I mean, come on, Max.He's _married,_ right?I figured he had to know _something._"

"Mm."Max said, deflating somewhat.He raised an eyebrow."Did he... ah... offer you any good advice?"

"Not really.Just kept saying stuff like 'you'll just know', and 'it's really wonderful,' and 'you'll never feel anything like it, Bart,' and stuff like that.Nothing concrete, or any kind of examples or anything, just a bunch of vague sayings like that.He pretty much sounded like you," Bart scowled at the memory, picking up his bowl and juice glass and walking to the sink."And he didn't tell me anything I didn't already hear."

"Ah, I see.Well, with this sort of thing, that's to be— "He glanced at the boy again."Didn't already hear?Who have you asked about this, Bart?"

Bart turned the water on."Besides Wally?"

"Yes."

"Uhm, mostly people I figured wouldn't let it get back to her."He began to tick off on his fingers."Wally.Jay.Jessie.Preston.Rob and Superboy.People who are okay with secrets or just don't know Cissie."

"Cissie."Max seemed to roll the name around his mouth, connecting names to faces."King-Jones?_Arrowette_ Cissie?"

Bart felt a blush come to his cheeks as he nodded.He'd really been trying to be careful about letting that little nugget of information out.He'd tiptoed around giving anything about 'the mystery girl' away around Kon and Robin, and most of the others hadn't really asked, or accepted his mumbled excuse that it was just "someone."But it was getting increasingly hard to keep his mind on keeping it a secret when... well, when she was all that was on his mind lately.

"Ah."He rubbed his chin."So let me see if I can hash this out.You think you've got feelings for Cissie, and you've asked around to find out how you can be sure, and what to do if you are sure.And now, you're asking me, I assume, to make sure you haven't gotten bad advice." 

"Well, to be truthful, I really did think about asking you all along, Max.And Wally, Jessie and Jay all told me I ought to talk to you first."

"Remind me to thank them for their generosity."Max interposed quietly.

"But... well, it's just that most of the time you're a little hard to follow, you know?I'm confused enough about what I should do without hearing, 'It's something you'll learn when you grow up,' or 'Be like the sparrow of the field and the water of the river' or something.And since it's not like I ever see you with girls, anyway, I wasn't sure if you'd understand what I meant."

"Quite unlike everyone else on the planet." 

"I didn't ask _everyone._Just a few people I know.People I hang around with."Bart paused, embarrassedly."Uhm.And Carol."

Max glanced at him as he stood from his forgotten breakfast and followed Bart into the living room."I take it by your tone of voice that it went over like a lead balloon."

"Yeah, I guess."He shrugged."I dunno.She just got all weird on me.She seemed fine when I asked her how I would know if I was in love... She was even helpful.And then she asked if I had anyone in mind, and when I told her, she just wigged."

"Imagine that."

Bart flopped down on the couch, his brows furrowing."She kept saying 'How can you?She's so... so... so _blonde.' _And she just got really snappish at anything I said after that.And I still don't know what she meant by that.I mean, how can someone help their hair color?And what does it have to do with how I feel?Talking to her just got me more confused."

"It's a confusing subject, Bart.I won't lie."Max exhaled as he sat down in his easy chair, folding his hands."I think you'll find that this is one of the times when no matter who you talk to, the advice is going to vary from person to person, and yes, that will definitely confuse you."

"Great."Bart moped.

Max smiled thinly."It sounds as though you have two burning questions.Are you in love with her, and what do you do about it if you are.Am I right?"

Bart nodded slowly.

"Let's take the easiest one first."Max steepled his fingers and pulled them up to his lips for a moment."Almost everyone you talk to about what you should do if you're in love with someone will probably give you fairly similar suggestions.Asking her out, giving her flowers, writing her a note, that sort of thing."

Bart sat there for a moment, going back over the ideas all his friends had given him.Kon suggested he be bold; tell whomever it was that he thought she was cute and offer to take her dancing.Robin had said almost the opposite, saying a low-key approach was better, and suggested a movie.Preston offered the services of a friend who wrote the best love-letters.Jessie said that he should look for common interests and hit on those: music, food, movies, whatever.But he saw the common thread, just like Max said.He was stunned that Max had hit it on the head so easily.

He nodded slowly again."Yeah."

"In other words, if you have fallen in love, you should do something to show her or tell her that you like her."He raised an eyebrow."Or have I gotten 'too hard to follow' already?"

"Okay, I should do something to show her or tell her somehow.Got it."Bart paused, and then shot him a perplexed, almost pleading look."But, Max, how do I _know?_That's the confusing part!"

"Of course it's confusing if you ask other people, Bart."Max looked at him and raised an eyebrow."Because there's only one person that can honestly answer that."

"You mean _me, _don't you?I told you, I don't have a clue, Max!I don't _know!_Agggh!I hate this!"Bart growled and stood up, throwing his hands into the air.He started pacing."Why can't I have any easy answers for once!Just _once, _can't someone give me a 'this is how it works, Bart,' or something?I mean, it's bad enough that she's running through my head every ten seconds, and I can't get my mind to stop thinking of her as warm and pretty, and I keep fixating on how blue her eyes are and I keep hearing the way she said she loved me and wonder if she actually... meant... any... of it..."

Bart trailed off, blinking, his jaw suddenly agape, as his mind caught up with his mouth.He slowly began to digest what he said._That's _what was causing him to continually think and rethink what she said.Not just a wonder if he felt the same way, but a wonder if she _meant_ any of it.

And why would he wonder if she meant any of it?Because he _wanted _her to mean it.

Which meant he _did _like her like that.

"Well."Max said, and a small smile made its way to his face, looking at the wide-eyed boy."Will wonders never cease.You've had a full-blown mental sunburst a whole twenty minutes before school.I think I may faint.Now, if you're a little less confused, why don't you get ready, okay?"

Bart felt the gears continue to turn as he packed up his backpack.It had taken a bit of prodding, but he'd begun to think things through.He knew why he'd been so preoccupied with what she said, now._"Bart... I love you!I've always loved you!Tell me it's how you feel too!"_He'd been so busy rebelling against the idea that he couldn't see that she was absolutely right.It _was _how he felt, too.He'd clouded it with worries about how he could feel that way for a friend, never realizing that what he felt for her was _more_ than just friendship.

He slung his backpack over his shoulder, and was surprised to find a bright smile on his face.Max was right.The only person who knew the answer was himself.And now that he'd answered that question, the other one— what to do about it— would fall into place soon enough.He'd might even have to figure that one out on the fly. 

His smile grew wider.Not a problem.He _was_ Impulse, after all.

He passed by Max in the living room, and even gave him an impromptu hug on the way out."Thanks, Max."

"Anytime."Max said, the surprise of the sudden show of affection settling into a smirk, eventually."Now scoot.Ten minutes to class.Don't be late."

"Oh, yeah, riiiight!"Bart said, and dashed out the door, closing it with a slam behind him.

Max stood there a moment, his smile fading, before looking upward and lowering a bushy eyebrow."You really hate me, don't you?"

And then Bart vibrated his head back through the door."Oh, hey, Max, about that sex thing...?"

"School._Now._"He growled. 

Bart laughed and was gone again, and with a sigh, Max chanced another look to the rafters, who offered him no condolences whatsoever.

* * *

Secret's blue eyes were wide."So you just decided?Just like that?"

Bart looked down and rested his head against the stasis cylinder, looking at her from the side of his amber eyes."Well, for me, it's easy that way.When I got rid of all the other questions and thoughts in my head, I knew what I was really feeling.See, Max taught me something early on.When I... focus on one thing, I'm really good at it.That's why I'm so good at video games.But when a bunch of thoughts start jumbling around in my head, that's when I get confused and the weird stuff happens."

"Like not realizing you care about someone?"Secret asked.

"Yeah," Bart said."Exactly.And I figured I'd already wasted enough time not knowing, so I wanted to make sure that I didn't screw it up and waste even more.Everyone said that I should try to ask her out, so I decided to focus my mind on that and nothing else. So I headed back to Happy Harbor after school to tell her..."

Secret wafted around him."Really?What happened?"

Bart glanced at her again, and then his eyes crept back up to Cissie, and he found himself restraining a small, sad smile at the memory.

"I found out that I'm not the only one who gets confused."He murmured.

* * *

Turtles moved faster than time did during his last two classes of the Friday school day.Snails moved faster._Inanimate objects _moved faster.Bart found himself tapping his pencil on the desk, fidgeting, stacking and restacking his books and watching the clock with an impatience that only mounted into irritation the closer the hands got to three o'clock.

_Tick._

Pause.

Long pause.

Ridiculously long, thoughtful, drawn-out, unbearable pause.

_Tick._

"Jeez, man, are you at the bit or what?"Preston half-turned from in front of him and hissed."You got big weekend plans or something?"

Bart nodded and glared at the clock."Something like that."

_Tick._

Pause.

Long, hateful, quite possibly evil pause.

_Tick._

"I heard there was a party at Amy McCaffery's house Saturday night." Preston wagged his eyebrows."You know, hush-hush.Her parents went on vacation, and— "

Bart nodded, not really listening."Party.Yeah."

_Tick._

Preston grinned."And I was thinking about going, anyway, so why don't we head there Saturday night?I mean, if your plans don't already..."

"Plans.Right."The second hand moved in slow motion.

_Tick._

"Uh-huh."Preston leaned back and waved a hand beside Bart's eyes. "And, anyway, since you're obviously not listening to a word I say, I was thinking that maybe it would be cool if after that I raided the girls' locker room..."

"Cool.Yeah."

_Tick._

Preston stared for a long moment, slowly raising an eyebrow."Riiight.And you could help by jumping into a vat of motor oil and man-eating piranhas, and while Impulse is getting you out of that, Elvis and The Loch Ness Monster will help me burn down the school..."

Fortunately, at that point, the bell rang, marking the end of school.Preston looked at the clock and sighed happily."Ahh, freedom.So, Bart...?"

He turned back to see an empty seat behind him.Bart was gone.A trail of loose papers rattled in the wind, all the way to the door.The teacher and a few of the other students were looking around, wondering where the sudden gust of wind had come from.The windows were closed, after all.

Preston stared at the empty seat for a few moments, then shrugged and started to pack up his own books."Jeez.Some people just have no time for proper conversation."

- ~ -

Superboy raised a brow as Bart blew into the monitor room, skidding to a halt by the main computer.

"Jeez, rush hour at the Justice Cave, I guess."He said, waving a cloud of kicked-up dirt from his nose— doubtlessly with his Tactile Telekinesis."How was school, Imp?"

"It was school."Bart sat down, found he couldn't stay sitting, and stood up, looking around at the screens."You've been here all day?"

Kon shrugged and toggled one of the monitors."Pretty much.Favor to Robin; He's got a check running, looking for some info on STAR Labs.Red Tornado is spending the day with Traya, so he asked me if I could monitor it and make sure all the info came through."

Bart could not possibly think of anything more boring than staring at text information on a computer screen for half the day.It didn't look like Kon was much into the idea, either.He actually had slight sleep rings around his eyes.

Bart patted him on the shoulder."You lost another bet, didn't you?"

Kon grumbled something just below the edge of hearing that sounded a little bit like 'yeah', and then scowled as he looked at Bart."Like I'm supposed to know he plays darts, too?"

"He plays darts?"Bart asked.

"He has to.Daily, I bet.Just in case of something like this.I figured it was a sure thing with my Tactile Telekinesis, y'know?I'd win, and I'd lead the team on the next mission."

Bart blinked."You _bet_ to lead the team?"

Kon was beyond hearing, it seemed."But, nooooo.Four friggin' bull's-eyes in a row.I swear he's not human.Must be one of those... whatchacall..."

"Androids?"Bart ventured.

"Metahumans!That's it!He's got some kinda super-power to not lose bets to me!"

"I dunno about that..."

"Or the power to take the powers and skills of the people he's on the team with!"Superboy straightened in his seat, upsetting a half-empty Gordetto's Pizza box.Bart caught a can of Soder Cola before it followed the pizza to the floor, and Kon barely noticed."That's it!He must have... like... somehow subconsciously drew on Arrowette's aim or something!"

"Ooookay."Bart chose not to dwell on that.That just had headache written all over it."Uhm.Speaking of her, is Cissie here?"

"Huh?"Kon surfaced from his glazed look and blinked at Impulse for a moment.

Bart decided Kon had been at the monitor far too long."Arrowette?Here?Yet?"

"Oh.Sorry.Yeah, her and Wondy went to the locker room a couple minutes ago.I think she's staying with Cass for the weekend, so they're gathering some things." He smirked knowingly at the young speedster."Why, is she the one you—"

There was a sound like a shot, and Kon blinked again and then stared.The monitor room was empty, except for the vaguely Bart-shaped after-image that faded away before he could rub his eyes.

Kon looked at the empty room for a second, and then slowly turned back to the computer screen.Then he pounded his fist on the desktop, triumphantly."Or... or maybe he _cheats!That's_ it!Robin _cheats!That's _how he does it!"

Then he glanced at the quiet around him, realizing no one would be answering.And slowly, sullenly, he went back to staring up at the screen-full of data, muttering."Or something.I mean, no one's that perfect."

- ~ -

"Well, no, he's not _perfect._"Cassie said, muffled by the door of the locker room.Not that she was being overly loud to begin with.It was the first words Bart had been able to make out."But, come on, Cissie, who is?You at least think he's cute, right?"

"Well, yeah, I guess," admitted the same voice that Bart hadn't been able to get out of his mind."But I admit Pocket Monsters are cute, too, and I don't think about kissing them or anything."

"Oh!So now you think about _kissing_ him?"Cassie's voice rose teasingly.

"_No!_"Cissie hissed, sounding a bit panicked.Then: "Could we talk about something else?You and Kon, maybe?Does the Boy of Steel have lips to match?"

There came a moment of silence, and then the snapping sound of a wet towel on bare skin.

"_Ow!" _Cissie yelped."A simple yes or no would have been fine!"

Bart winced in the hallway as he paced, waiting.After what happened to Superboy when he just tried to drill a peephole, he wasn't about to try to actually go into the locker room while the girls were in there.So he'd been waiting for them to come out, as patiently as was humanly possible for him.

Which, after the day he'd had, wasn't really all that much.He'd started pacing back and forth a while ago, after forcing himself to quit tapping his foot until it became a blur.

He'd just about considered running to the Florida Keys and back to work off some extra tension when the door to the locker room opened and the girls stepped out, out of uniform— wearing their usual jeans and tees for the warm fall weather outside— and still giggling.But a step out of the locker room, they noticed him, and both Cissie and Cassie stared, wide-eyed, down at him.

_Down at him?_Funny.He didn't remember Cissie being that tall.Or Cassie, either.

They pointedly stared at his feet.It wasn't until he looked down as well that he realized that he'd paced a half-foot-deep trench into the stone floor.

"Whoops."He said.

Cassie grew the beginnings of a smile."Sorry, Bart.We weren't keeping you from the locker room, were we?I mean, have you been here long?"

"Oh, no."Bart grinned as he stepped up to the floor."I was just..."

_I was just listening to you two talk and waiting for Cissie._He was vaguely sure that broke some sort of unwritten rule, so he quickly tried to manufacture an excuse for why he would be pacing outside the locker room.And as often happened, his mind went completely blank.

"...Uhm.I was just... I... Just... practicing... uhm... channeling my... speed... into the ground."He managed, piecemeal.

"Oh yeah?Cool."Cassie said, as if that excuse more than satisfied her."Bet that would have all sorts of cool uses when we fight villains, right?"

"Uhm, yeah.Hope so."Bart said.He couldn't tear his eyes from Cissie, even though he knew he probably shouldn't stare like that.He dimly realized that she hadn't yet closed her mouth and was staring at him, too."You okay, Cissie?"

"Uhm."Cissie blinked once."Yeah... 'k..."

"Oh, oops."Cassie moved and tripped over nothing, losing enough balance for a moment to nudge Cissie.She bent down momentarily to re-tie her already-tied shoelaces."Sorry.Darn sneakers."

The nudge seemed to break Cissie out of her stupor.Her face went from pinkish-red back to something more near her usual shade.But her eyes still seemed bigger and bluer than Bart had ever seen them.

"Sorry.Mind just went... y'know... elsewhere."She even managed to find a smile that looked every bit like the one he'd seen in his head as she chuckled."I'm fine now.Hey, how was school, Bart?"

"It was okay, I guess."He grinned.That sounded like the Cissie he knew."You?Kon said you two were gonna hang together this weekend?"

"Unless she gets other pla—_nnmph!_"Cassie's eyes bugged and she glanced down at Cissie's elbow, which was resting comfortably in her midsection.She slowly looked back up and gave Bart an embarrassed grin."Uhm.In fact, why don't I just check in on Kon or something?"

Cissie's eyes widened and her head whipped around, shooting the other girl a glance."Cassie— "

But Wonder Girl was already backing up well out of elbow range, or reach, for that matter.Her hands were behind her back, and she just continued to beam a cheesy smile at the two."Or... or maybe see how Robin's doing.Or... Secret!Yeah, Secret... she... wanted to see me, anyway.She wanted to... uhm... tell me... tell me a secret!Right!"She grinned.

And then she turned and bolted.

Bart scratched his head.He whispered, out of the side of his mouth."You know, I worry about her sometimes." 

"That's okay.You'll have good reason to, soon enough."Cissie slowly rubbed at the bridge of her nose, and then, with an exhale, she looked back up at him and a smile peeked out at him."Channeling speed into the ground, huh?"

"Kinda.Sorta.Not really."Bart said, shrugging, dropping his gaze to his feet, surprised to find them shuffling.For someone that had spent all day focusing himself to talk to her, he'd managed to suddenly find his tongue not wanting to work right.He tried to kick his mind in gear while staring at the butterfly pattern on her shirtfront, when it occurred to him that starting at her shirt probably wasn't helping.His eyes found the floor again. "Uhm, Cissie?"

"Hmm?"

"Uhm."Another shuffle of his feet.He glared down at them and stuffed his hands into his pockets so they wouldn't suddenly start shuffling, too._Max would either laugh at you or ask where the real Bart is, Mister Act-First-Think-Later.Where's that impulsiveness now?_He'd just about set his jaw in resolve at the thought when he looked back up at her face and nearly felt it drain away all over again."Uhm.Can I talk to you?"

Laughter flickered in her eyes— and it was so not right that she had the sort of soft blue eyes that could just draw him in."Of course, Bart.I mean, we're already talking, aren't we?"

"Well, yeah."He nearly bit his tongue and tried to think of something to say.His mind kept giving him the iconic equivalent of a TV test pattern.He fell to silence.

"Liberally defined, at least."She smirked, and after another long moment of silence, she reached up and tousled his hair.She had surprisingly soft fingers for someone who drew a bowstring back every day."Hey, there something wrong, bud?"

"No..."He said, still thinking.He thought he could mentally hear the long beep of the Emergency Broadcast System._Thanks a lot, brain._"Uhm..."

She let the silence fall again, and then, slowly, so did her hand.She gave him a contrite smile."Well, hey... I wish I could stay around, but I should probably get set to go.Cassie's mom would freak if she got home and we weren't there.

"If you're here over the weekend, I'm sure we'll stop by, though," She turned back down the hallway, looking back over her shoulder at him."Okay, Bart?"

_Say.Something.Tell.Her.Something._

"See y— "She started.

She never finished it.Bart's hand shot out and closed around her wrist, not roughly, just enough to get her attention.She looked back at him with a curious glance, and before her eyes could meet his and make him completely forget what he was going to say, everything came out.

Everything.

"Cissie, I know this isn't supposed to work out like this but ever since you got me to quit vibrating by saying what you did— remember back in the basement of the court building there where Reddy was seeing the judge to try to claim Traya—I haven't been able to get it off my mind and it's just been replaying and replaying andreplaying and it made me think that I really like youthatway too but I wasn't sure at first so I asked Max and he gaveme one of those 'thinkfor yourself Bart' talks you knowthe ones I mean and anyway I asked everyone I knew well not _everyone_everyone but a few of my friends I asked them whatIshould do and everyonesaid that I should talkto youand seeifmaybe you reallydidfeelthe samewayand I shouldaskyou out if you'renottoobusyImean andifyouwouldn'tmind Imean I'mfreeand allsowouldyou wannamaybe dosomethinglikedancing oramovieordinner orsomething tomorroworSunday orevennextweekthatwould beallcool withmeImeanso IguessI'maskingyou wouldyougo outwithme, Cissie?"

He looked at her hopefully and, as an afterthought, took a breath.

She stared at him with wide eyes and slowly shook her head."Uhm.Bart?I completely lost you after about the first second.Say again?"

He quirked a brow at her."The whole thing?"

"The highlights would probably be fine."

He inhaled a deep breath.But just before he could voice it all again he suddenly found her finger pressing tight to his lips, cutting off the words.

"Slowly this time, okay?"She added.

"Slow.Right."Bart said, becoming uncertain again as thought began to take over compulsion.

She seemed to notice, and offered him a very trustworthy smile."Bart... we're really good friends, right?Whatever it is, whatever's on your mind, you can tell me.Promise."

He looked up at her for a moment, swallowed once, and lost in that smile, he hit the highlights that mattered most to him."I... I really think I like you, Cissie.Would you go out with me?"

Her smile stayed plastered on her face for a long moment, as though it had become sculpted there.Then she slowly found voice.

"Cassie put you up to this, didn't she?"

"What?"His eyes went goggle-wide, and he shook his head vehemently."No, _no,_ this was all me.I kept thinking of when you broke me out of vibrating by telling me you... you know, loved me.And I couldn't get it out of my head.And even if you didn't really mean it, that's okay, it just got me thinking.Really thinking.

"And I started to understand that the reason I couldn't get it out of my head was 'cause I was feeling the same thing.I really liked you, too."He shuffled his feet and looked up at her again.That smile hadn't moved a millimeter.He was afraid she might be in some sort of shock again."Uhm.You like Italian?"

"Huh?"She seemed to follow the change of subject slowly; her expression barely flickered.

"Italian.You like it?I mean, if you're not busy sometime this weekend, I could pick you up and take you somewhere.I can probably get some money from Max, and..." He glanced at the glazed look in her eyes."...if you're not gonna fall over, I mean.Breathe or something, okay?"

For a long moment he thought she hadn't heard a word.She just stood there, like she'd been clubbed on the head or something.The only sign he hadn't suddenly kicked into hyperspeed was the fact that she blinked after a few seconds.And then her smile grew a millimeter wider, and her voice trailed out softly, still with a bit of a dazed sound.But it still hit him like a cool, refreshing splash of water.

"Uhm.Saturday night okay with you?"

* * *

"Ohh," Secret said softly."That's so sweet, Bart.I didn't even know you two had gone out together."

"It probably... didn't... y'know... get around."He murmured, his eyes still drawn up the stasis cylinder, to her face._It would have.I wouldn't have kept quiet about it.I couldn't help it_.

"Did you... go out long?"

"Just that once.Last Saturday."_I would have done it more.I would have done it whenever I could.I barely had time to realize I cared.Who knows what all we could have done together if we'd just..._

Somewhere, in the labyrinthine depths of Bart Allen's mind, the spark of a thought began to form.His eyes began to narrow as he stared at her unseeing wide ones.

_If we'd just..._

Iconic thought flared into being, electrical impulses leaping synapses.His fingertips trailed up the glass, separating her hands from his.He could acutely feel the molecules of air writhe around his fingers, just like he had when he'd been a moment too late to save her from her own arrow.Iconic thought began to give way to idea.

"Bart?"Secret asked, her smoky brow furrowing."What did you say?"

_If we'd just had..._

"...time."Bart said, and then she was talking to an after-image as a sound like a gunshot startled her, and a burst of wind and a wake of electrical speed-force sparks marked his passage from the room.

Tendrils of her smoke, caught in his draft, wafted toward the open doorway, where Robin, Superboy and Wonder Girl looked up at the sound and sudden blast of wind that interrupted their own memories of Cissie.The wind yanked at Robin's cape, caused Kon's eyes to grow wide as he whipped his head around to look.

"What the _hell?_"He gaped.

Secret made it to the door, her eyes large and luminous."I think maybe I did a bad thing.We were talking, and then Bart just— "

"Blew out," Cassie said, her eyes wide."Hera, where could he go?We're on the _moon._"

"Volcano's being held here."Kon murmured pensively. "You don't think he's going to try to..."

"I don't think so.Not Bart."Robin looked at Suzie, passed on a glance that said, _It's okay_, and then looked the direction the speedster had gone.He put his mask back on."But I don't know what he _is_ doing.And he may be in worse shape than we thought.So we'd better find out, before he hurts himself.Or someone else."

"How, Robin?"Suzie asked worriedly."He ran out so fast I couldn't even _see_ him!"

"This is still Impulse we're talking about."Robin said as he led them out of into the hallway at a dead run."If he didn't leave a trail, that's when I'll really start worrying about what happened to him."

Sure enough, he did.Robin pointed them down the hallway, then further, toward the main levels, where an pathway of loose papers and lightweight debris that had obviously been caught in Impulse's wake was still coming to a rest.The further they followed it, however, the more Robin's .He remembered following the path Bart's trail was leading.He'd been there himself, not too long ago, when he'd first arrived.

The teleporters.

Secret saw where they were headed."This is the direction of the tubes we came up in, isn't it?"

"Rob, it's probably bad enough if he's running around here, especially if he's in that sort of mindset."Superboy reminded him as he landed behind the Boy Wonder, the two girls pulling up beside him."But if he goes to Earth, I don't know if we can even track him down, let alone talk with him." 

"I know."Robin said, and pulled out a miniaturized communicator from his belt.He tapped in a sequence of keys.When in Rome, you do as the Romans, he thought.And when in the Watchtower, you get the JLA.Post-haste.


	4. Renewal

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

**Disclaimer:** All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.  I am not making any profit from their use.  "Win Argo's Caffeine Intake" promotion valid in all states except Maine, New Jersey and Montana.  Odds of winning 1 in 1,245,356,000, assuming Argo can last for a few days without caffeine.  

**Author Notes:**  Thanks to all of you who have read and reviewed and tried hard not to throw objects at my e-mail address because it's been a while since I posted the opening parts of this.  Hopefully, you'll all think it's worth it in the end, because I've tried really hard to hold off posting until I had the whole thing finished.  More fun with flashbacks, here, and I hope they're not too hard to follow, but like a lot of my stories, too much is happening too many different areas.  Oh well.  After the recent happenings in Impulse and YJ, I think I needed this, anyway.  Hope you all did, too.

* * * * *

FOUR – Renewal

_    Twenty minutes ago..._

    "The timing was just kinda out there."  Cassandra Sandsmark said, looking up at the two guys from the couch.  Short locks of her sandy-colored hair fell before her eyes, and she brushed them away, distractedly.  "I mean, I had seen the whole thing at the pool, when Bart asked her if she wanted to change CD's, and you could see something... different, I guess... in his eyes.  But I didn't pay any attention to it at first.  It wasn't until Kon had told me that Bart had asked him about going out with someone, that I started putting two and two together."

    "Him and Cissie?"  Kon said, blinking.  "I kinda hazed him about it, here and there... but man, I never thought they..."

    He trailed off, looking at Robin, who was touching his chin thoughtfully.  And then Tim slowly nodded, as though pieces of a puzzle were just starting to fit into order in his mind.  

    Kon glowered.  Trust the Boy Detective to have some idea what was going on.

    "I didn't really have any idea until you mentioned it," Tim said.  "But it makes a lot more sense now.  To be honest, I thought maybe, because they knew each other so well, she was giving him pointers or something, the same way we did."

    "Men.  Go figure."  Cassie said with a small smile.  She glanced toward the next room, saw her best friend, frozen and icy, in the stasis cylinder, saw Bart kneeling down in front of her.  Every so often, his head turned to regard Secret, but his eyes kept coming back to the frozen girl, as though nothing could take his attention from her for long.

    She looked back at the other two.  "I know I was giving her a bit of a hard time about it, too.  Especially last weekend, after he'd asked her out to dinner."  

    "To dinner?"  Kon blinked.  "He did know that would mean he'd actually have to sit still, right?  Is he capable of that?"

    Tim glanced at the next room.  "I wouldn't have thought so until I saw him now."

    "I think we might have sold him short."  Cassie said, nodding at Tim.  "For that matter, we might have sold her short, too."

    "Her?"  Tim raised an eyebrow.  "Cissie?"

    "What makes you say that?"  Kon frowned.

    "Not as a teammate or anything."  She exhaled a breath.  "It just... well, it takes two to tango, like they say."

    Superboy's jaw dropped.  "Aw, _man._  You mean they—?"

    "_No!_"  Cassie sent him a withering glare.  "Get your mind out of the gutter, Kon.  I'm saying that you're treating this as if Bart just decided that he and Cissie would go out and that was that.  Cissie wouldn't have thought twice about it if it was just some sort of friendly get-together or something.

    "But I don't think either of you realize what she felt about him, too.  And that's what makes this all the worse..."

* * *

    _Saturday..._

    "What do you mean?  This couldn't _possibly_ be worse."  Cissie glowered at the array of clothes on the bed, and then at the ones hanging off the door of the wardrobe.  And, then, just to be fair, she glared at the ones strewn haphazardly around on the floor.  Blouses, t-shirts, sweatshirts, sweaters, skirts and jeans— none of them escaped her baleful gaze.

    "Well sure it could.  You could be freaking out over your underwear, too."  Cassie said wryly, twisting her neck to get a kink out.  

    Cissie's eyes suddenly went wide as that realization sank in.  She looked down at herself, and pulled at the neck of her oversize sleep tee, which she had put on after deciding her last change of clothes made her look too cutesy. "Underwear.  Oh God— "

    "He probably says you'd better not even start.  Ciss, you already have plenty of clothes here.  I'm sure there's something that looks fine.  In fact, _most _of it looks fine."  Cassie rubbed at her shoulders. "I still can't believe that you made me fly all the way to the Elias school to lug all of this stuff to my house.  Heck, I can't believe you _have _all this stuff at school.  Don't you usually wear uniforms there, anyway?"

    "You can never be too prepared."  Cissie said, picking up a suede vest and a white shirt, looking at them closely and then dropping them back to the floor.  She let loose a growl and plopped down on the bed.  "Unless you're me.  And then you can't be too _under-_prepared."

    Cassie looked at her for a long moment, and lifted a pair of jeans to make room on her inflatable chair to sit down.  "You're a little hung up on this, aren't you?  I mean, this is just Bart, right?  But the way you're getting all high-strung about tonight, and all, it's like..."

    "If you make any analogy whatsoever to my mother, Cass, you'll eat the next set of clothes."

    "No, no.  I was gonna say it's like you're going out with the guy from Generation Why or something."  Cassie leaned over and plucked up a striped blouse and midlength black skirt, holding them up for display.  "These are nice.  Opinion?"

    "The blouse makes me look fat and the skirt looks something to wear to a funeral.  He'll probably think I'm in mourning because I've gained weight."  Cissie said morosely, and then she sighed, draping her hand over her mouth.  "Oh, jeez.  Cass, I... I know I'm getting high-strung and a little bent out of shape over this."

    "Right.  Just a little.  Listen, I know I joked about it at the cave, and I'm really sorry.  I didn't know he was standing out there and probably heard everything.  But are you... do you really... you know, like him?"  Cassie discarded the clothes and picked up a set of faded overalls and a pink shirt.  Her eyes lit up.  "Heyyyy..."

    "Please.  Not even.  That has farmer girl written all over it."  Cissie said, not even looking up as the other girl dropped the overalls back to the floor and rolled her eyes.  "You know, this may sound stupid... but... well, yeah, I know he acts before he thinks.  And he sometimes thinks life's a game, and he says stuff that even I don't understand.  Or pretend to for that matter.  And sometimes, he gets really focused on things, to the point that the rest of the world could be yelling, and he wouldn't even notice.

    "But he's so completely sweet, too, and I really noticed it when he asked me out.  There's just... something about him."  She sighed again and reclined back, staring at the ceiling.  "I mean, yeah, he's cute.  Yeah, he has the most awesome hair.  Yeah, he's usually fun to be around, and he asks a lot of questions if he doesn't understand something, instead of pretending he knows everything.  But it's... more than that.  It's like, when he talks to me, there's no posturing or anything.  No stories, no mindgames, just that big-eyed... innocence, I guess.  He just lays it out for you, and you know he's being open and honest, because he's just no good at being anything else.  So when he told me he really liked me..."

    "...you just melted."  Cassie smiled.

    "Like movie-style popcorn butter."  Cissie admitted with a bit of a blush.  She flopped her head over on the bed, looked at her friend through a thin veil of blond hair.  "You helped, though."

    Cassie blinked.  "I did?  Come again?"

    "In the locker room, when you told me Kon said Bart was asking advice about feelings he had for someone, and then started pestering me about it?"  She looked back at the ceiling, brushed aside her hair.  "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't already considered it.  I mean, I saw the way he looked at me by the pool, and... I just saw how eager he was to please.  The way his eyes lit right up.

    "And I guess I thought, wouldn't it be nice if he was half as focused on me as he gets on videogames?  Maybe not him, specifically, but someone."  She paused for a long moment.  "I mean, after having my mother live her own life through me, wouldn't it be cool for someone to... well, for someone to put me first for once?"

    "Well, yeah.  Of course."  Cassie looked at her.  "But that's asking a lot of him right off the bat, isn't it?  Bart _is_ sorta the poster child for Attention-Deficit Syndrome, remember."

    "Meaning, the whole idea is stupid."  Cissie sighed.

    "Why do you say that?"  Cassie asked.  "You don't like him?"

    "No, I like him fine, but—"

    Cassie interrupted.  "You think he's gonna take you to some seedy place to eat?"

    "Well, I would hope not, but—"

    "Maybe he's going to deliberately show you a lousy time?"

    "I sort of doubt it—"

    "You don't think he's gonna try to put a move on you or something?"

    Cissie's eyes went wide.  "_God, _no.  This is _Bart _we're talking about, Cass."

    "Then, no, not at all.  I think stranger things have happened, and you never know what'll happen until you try."  She smiled ingratiatingly and tossed a pair of jeans with flowery trim at the archer.  "And incidentally, I'm totally for the two of you having a good time.  I think he'll be paying attention to Cissie King-Jones tonight, not Blast Orbit Vega, or whatever the videogame of the week is."  

    "Really?"  Cissie asked, sitting up slowly.

    "Really.  And who knows?  Maybe he's just been waiting around for the right person to show that he can think before he acts."  She picked up a buff sweater from the bed and dropped it on Cissie's lap.

    Cissie made a face.  "Too frumpy."

    "Too bad."  Cassie grinned at her.  "If he's going to learn to think before he acts, you're going to learn to not over-think."

    "I... see."

    She was silent for a long moment and then smiled.  

    "Cass?"

    "Yeah?"

    "Thanks."

    She quirked a grin.  "Don't thank me yet, Ciss.  You still have makeup to obsess over."

    Cassie then leaned over started to pick up a few of the outfits and neatly stack them, pretending to ignore the way Cissie's face paled all over again. 

- ~ -

    She was in the living room at ten-fifteen— studying, she swore, not just reading the same paragraph over and over— when she heard the crack of a gunshot outside and instinct took over.  By the time she realized that the noise was a human body, or for that matter a pair of them, breaking the sound barrier, she was already behind the couch, making a grab for her wig and goggles.

    She slowly peeked her head out, looking at the clock.  They were back fifteen minutes early.  Then she stared at the door, waiting for it to open and Cissie to walk through— mostly so Cassie could ambush her with an immediate barrage of questions, starting with, "How _was_ it?"

    The door, as though sensing her, stubbornly and resolutely stayed closed.

    She took a few steps across the living room, toward the front door, listening.  She figured she'd hear a telltale giggle or one of them raising their voice somewhat or something, or the doorknob clicking open.

    But no.  Nothing.  Not a thing.

    She was about to tiptoe a few steps closer and actually press her ear to the door when the doorknob clicked with the sound of a spare key opening the lock, and the sound of another gunshot came from the porch.  And then, before Cassie could drop to a chair and look suitably innocent and not at all like she was trying to eavesdrop, Cissie was inside, pressing the door closed with her behind, leaning against it and staring off into space with a goofy smile on her face.

    She stood that way for a good ten seconds, not even noticing that Cassie was standing in the same room.  Ten seconds became fifteen, and the only sound in the room was a soft, happy sigh from the archer at the doorway.

    "That good?"  Cassie enquired, with a small smirk.

    "Mmm?"  Cissie murmured, blinking, and then went wide-eyed as she pulled herself out of her daze.  "_Ahhhh!_  What are you _doing_ here?" 

    Cassie looked around herself for a moment and then raised her eyebrow.  "I sort of live here.  At least, last I checked, I did."

    "Well, yeah, but—"  Cissie started.

    "Unless... oh, my _God!_"  Cassie slapped her cheeks, dramatically.  "What if Mom's been playing a horrible _hoax_ on me for the last few years?"

    Cissie crossed her arms.  "Are you quite through?"

    She grinned and thrust her arms behind her back.  "Pretty much, yeah."

    "Okay, then.  I meant, so what are you doing here, in the living room?"  Cissie rolled her eyes and sighed.  "Oh, wait.  I know.  You were waiting up for me because your curiosity just wouldn't be satisfied.   And now you're going to have me tell you all the gory details of my night out.  And if I just tell you I had a nice time, or it was okay, it wouldn't be nearly good enough.  Right?"

    Cassie picked her textbook off the couch and displayed it.  "Actually, I was studying."

    Cissie flushed and looked like she felt about five inches tall.  "Oh."

    Cassie let the quiet fall for a couple moments.

    "But since you're here now, well, my curiosity just can't be satisfied.  So spill all the gory details, Ciss."  An impish grin grew on her face.  "And don't give me any 'I had a nice time' or 'it was okay', because that isn't nearly good enough."  

    Cissie smirked.  "It was different.  Nice.  Does that work?"

    "Try again."  She led the way into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of milk.  "Define 'nice'.  Meaning you didn't have a date interrupted by super-villains or budding world disasters?"

    "Well, that too."  Cissie smiled and a bit of a blush touched her cheeks.  "But I mean... he was really sweet, and really well-behaved, too.  He didn't blather off at the mouth too much, and he held the doors open and pulled out my chair for me and... well, it was just so different from any way I've seen him before.  You know, he actually likes things besides video games?  I had no idea."

    "Mm-hmm," Cassie said with a knowing smile, closing up the fridge and making her way back toward the living room.  "It sounds serious."

    "Well, it's too early to tell.  But tonight definitely made me look at him in a new light.  It was actually kind of charming, the way he acted.  The whole night he was attentive, open... honest.    I mean, he didn't try to force a goodnight kiss on me.

    "Handsome, too."  Cissie smiled and sat down in the easy chair, idly twirling her hair around her finger.  "God, there's two words I didn't think I would say in the same sentence: Bart and handsome.  But it's true.  He can just make you melt, the way those big amber eyes just seem to look right through you."

    "Oh, and that hair," Cassie supplied helpfully.

    "Oh, yeah.  The hair.  It's always just this side of unruly, but it's such a perfect sort of wildness; he was nuts when he cut it.  It's the kind of hair you just want to run your han..."  She stopped and blushed again, noticing at Cassie's 'I told you so' expression.  "Okay, maybe I think he's more than just a little cute.  I must be somewhere near out of my head."

    "Sounds like you are."  Cassie grinned and set her glass down on the end table, picking up the textbook from the couch again and marking her place.  "So, where did the smitten little speedster take you?  Olive Garden?"

    "Uhm..." Cissie blushed, a bit more.  "Well, no."

    "Oh, good.  Too cliché.  Milano Inn?"  She asked, and then persisted at Cissie's shake of her head.  "Hmm.  Iari Brothers?  No _way._  Too swank.  Pizzano's?  No.  Dress code.  Oh, _Hera.  _Tell me he didn't take you to Medici House.  I would _kill _to go there."

    Cissie shook her head again, looking a bit embarrassed.

    "Fine.  Then _where?_"  Cassie said, putting her hands on her hips.

    "Just some all-night place, I think.  I don't remember the name."  

    "An all-night place?"  Cassie asked incredulously, racking her brain of all the Italian restaurants she knew.  "In Gateway?"

    "Uhm, not quite."  A small smile peeked up from under Cissie's nose.  "In Rome."

    Cassie blinked a couple times, mouthing that.  Then she flounced down on the couch, crossing her arms and pouting.  "I want a new boyfriend."

* * *

    _Two minutes ago..._

    "He took her to _Italy?_  On a _date?_"  Kon's eyes bugged.  "Oh, get _out._"

    "It wasn't all that surprising, once I thought it through."  Cassie said and shrugged, looking back at the speedster and the frozen archer.  "I didn't really get a chance to find out much more about that night from her; she wasn't all that open about it.  But you could see the way her eyes lit up whenever I asked.  Just like his did.  It must have been really special.  Or at least on the way to becoming it."  

    "Must have been," Tim said quietly, as Cassie saw Bart raise his head, slowly, in the next room.

    "They were going to go out tonight, too," Cassie said despondently, then shook her head.  "Hera, for all I knew, he was going to take her to Mexico or something.  It's just really sad, seeing how— "

    And then there was an explosion of noise and a burst of wind, and whatever Cassie was going to say was blown right out of her head.

The wind yanked at Robin's cape, whipping it around wildly, but Kon was the first one to get his voice back.

    "What the _hell?_"  He gaped.

    Cassie looked to the door, saw Suzie approached with a wide-eyed expression.  That was all that she could see for a few moments— Secret's smoke had been whisked all over the next room in the wind's gale fury and was just now coalescing back into human form.  She sounded worried.  "I think maybe I did bad.  We were talking, and then Bart just— "

    Sure enough, the stasis cylinder in the room stood alone; the frozen form of Arrowette now stared down at nothing.  No wild-haired speedster sat at the base of the machinery, keeping vigil.

    "Blew out," Cassie said, stunned.  Her eyes grew wide as she tried to think.  "Hera, where could he go?  We're on the _moon._"

    Kon rubbed at his stubbled chin, trying to piece together as well.  "Volcano's being held here.  You don't think he's going to try to..."

    He trailed off, thankfully.  Cassie couldn't bring herself to think of Bart as a murderer, even if he really did love Cissie.  She shivered.

    "I don't think so.  Not Bart."  Robin glanced at Suzie and put his mask back on.  "But I don't know what he _is_ doing.  And he may be in worse shape than we thought.  So we'd better find out, before he hurts himself.  Or someone else."

    "How, Robin?"  Suzie asked.  The tendrils of smoke writhed around her restlessly, as if it were feeding off Suzie's own apprehension.  And if that was the case, she was a step short of being worried sick.  "He ran out so fast I couldn't even _see_ him!"

    Robin motioned them out into the hallway, pointing out a trail of debris immediately.  He began to follow it at a jog, then a dead run.  "This is still Impulse we're talking about.  If he didn't leave a trail, that's when I'll really start worrying about what happened to him."

    And so they followed on, finding the trail leading back toward the teleporters, and Robin immediately called the JLA.  And shortly after that, Cassie watched as everything hit the fan all at once.

* * *

    _Elsewhen..._

    The screen remained lit in front of him, and the data flickered before his eyes, scrolling upward.  Hunter took a sip of coffee and exhaled softly as he watched all the facts and figures of the file that had been called up for him.

    He frowned deeply.  "How sure are you of this?"

    "More than just sure."  Waverider said impatiently, crossing his arms in front of his chest.  He looked at the other members of the Linear Men, seated around the conference table.  

    "Ninety-eight-point-two percent sure."  Liri Lee supplied.

    "With a one-point-eight percent margin for error."  Matthew Ryder voiced, much like a death knell.

    The three didn't flicker at all.  There was no strobing, no continued speech by thirty different temporal selves.  Just Matthew, Liri, Waverider and Hunter.  For some reason, Hunter found it a little unsettling that they were all stable and not shimmering throughout the timestream.  It just felt wrong.  

    But he understood the reason for it.  In the main conference room of Vanishing Point, it was an unwritten rule among the Linear Men that you appeared in the 'here' and 'now'— so to speak— so that you were focused on the discussion at hand and nothing more.

    As such, meetings like this didn't happen often.  And they usually meant worst-case scenarios.  

    Hunter looked at the screen again, humming in thought.  "He's not exactly a regular temporal violator, is he?  Is there evidence he's done it before?"

    "We're having a hard time telling."  Waverider murmured.

    "Explain."  Hunter said, looking across the table with a raised eyebrow.

    Waverider's black eyes shied away from their usually hard look, became a bit more apologetic.  "For one thing, we can't find him."

    Hunter pinched his lips.  "Can't... find him?"

    "The temporal spike isn't making matters easier.  Already changes are forming in the timeline, which makes tracking a single individual or entity more difficult.  Each separate individual has a set chronometric pattern encoded into their DNA that marks them from a particular timeline."  Liri Lee offered, calling up a chart, which showed a red line breaking into two branches, one red, the other green. 

    "If the timeline diverges," Waverider said, following the red line all the way along, "the proper chronometric pattern should still be traceable, and it should mark him as being from a divergent timeline."

    "Hypertime signature."  Hunter grunted.  "By itself, that should be more than enough to find him."

    Liri nodded and cued the graphic back to the temporal spike they had been monitoring.  "Ordinarily.  We think our job might have been made a bit more difficult because he himself is responsible for the spike.  But above and beyond that, it seems as though shortly after the spike itself was created, he dropped out of the timeline altogether."

    "A temporal casualty?"  Hunter suggested.  "Maybe the timeline erased him."

    "Doubtful."  Ryder stepped in.  "He appears to be something of a time anomaly, himself, so he's less apt to having temporal changes affect him.  Unfortunately, that also makes it extremely hard to track and pin down data on him.  What little we know leads us to believe that he himself is a temporal traveler, having an origin point of somewhere in the thirtieth century.  It is unknown what happened to take him to the late twentieth and early twenty-first, but his travel backwards into time seems to have coincided dramatically with case file Zero."

    "The Zero Hour event."  Hunter said, his mind already in fast-forward.  "Meaning that..."   

    "Meaning that standard chronometric tracing systems are somewhat prone to error, anyway.  But we've managed to piece together a little, here and there.  And what data we've found leads us to believe this is an isolated case.  Although he certainly would have the knowledge to regularly break through the timestream, if he so desired."  Liri tapped a sequence on her computer, lighting up the main screen with a new influx of data.  "Wrote his first e-text on human thought and reaching the mind's potential at twenty.  Had eight doctorates by age twenty-eight, including one for Quantum Theory at Oxford.  Cured the genetically-engineered Leimann Virus in 2032, with no prior microbiology degrees.  Nobel Prize in science twice before age thirty-five.  He's a prodigy."

    "That just makes him smart."  Waverider pointed out, darkly.  "It doesn't make him less dangerous to the timestream, quite the opposite.  Remember, Extant wasn't much more than a street-punk before he stepped out of the time-stream."  

    "If someone with a lot more knowledge is responsible for a spike that changes the flow of time, he has to be stopped."  Matthew added, touching the beginning of the graphic on the monitor; the flat line that represented the timeline looked like the heart-monitor of a man who'd run a marathon.  "For all we know, the crest of that spike could end up destroying the Earth, if we let the new timeline stabilize.  We don't know what changes are going to be effected until we get a more secure reading.  We may be having a hard time tracking him, but he has to be at his entry point to the timestream.  I say we hit his entry point and— "

    "And what?"  Hunter interrupted tersely.  "Kill him?"

    Liri glanced up from the data-screen, her eyes narrowing.  "The history and the future are in our hands, Hunter.  Ours alone.  That's not at all hard to understand, is it?  Whether he's a regular violator or not, whatever the outcome he's trying for, he's disrupting the normal flow of time.  And that makes it our responsibility.  We should be stopping him, not speculating about it."

    "For God's sake, you're making him out to be some sort of world-threatening villain.  Listen to yourselves.  Comparing him with Extant, saying he could wipe out the Earth?"  Hunter stabbed at his own screen, angrily.  "Are you reading the same file I am?  Assumed a 'costumed identity' upon his first appearance in the twentieth century.  Founding member of Young Justice.  He even became the Flash for a couple years before retiring the whole metahuman side of the equation.  Then taking up a teaching profession, and eventually living a quiet life before he dies—"  

    Waverider slammed a fist down.  "Hal Jordan.  Hank Hall.  Walker Gabriel.  You don't have to tell us that costumed heroes don't try to erase their own mistakes, Hunter.  You can't say that they don't circumvent their own laws when they feel the need arises.  Power corrupts."

    Matthew raised his own voice.  "And even if he's not a villain, we have no way of knowing that he's _not _world-threatening.  Even if he has the best of intentions, there's nothing to say that those good intentions won't cause some incalculable temporal disaster.  Hunter, no one man's wishes should be above the possible safety of the Earth's timeline!  That's madness!"

    "Spare me."  Hunter's brow lowered.  He was about to interject another point when the door to the room whisked open.

    An unruly-haired man with a strong chest that stretched his nondescript grey jumpsuit stepped inside, looking the four over.  His jaw twitched once, beneath a five-o'clock shadow that had stretched to quarter-till-ten, and then his eyes swung to the white-haired Linear Man.  "It's all right, Hunter.  You tried.  That's all I could ask."

    He looked at the three seated around the table, who were gaping at him in wide-eyed shock.  And then a small, thin smile twisted his lips upward.  "Sorry.  Even time-proof doors aren't always completely soundproof.  I couldn't help hearing some of what you said outside."

    He made his way inside, dropped himself into a chair and folded his hands sanguinely, continuing to meet the gaze of first one Linear Man, then another.  

    "Let me guess."  He said, and that grin rose a bit further.  "You were talking about Bart Allen."

* * *

    _Now..._

    "I'm sorry, Robin, but we didn't feel the need to lock the teleporters from the members of Young Justice.  We didn't bring you up to the Watchtower for imprisonment or incarceration."  He said, crossing his arms across his expansive chest and flicking a blue-eyed gaze to the leader of Young Justice.  "You've all been through a traumatic ordeal."

    He was not a he, he was most definitely a He.  Even without flying, without his red cape flapping in a breeze like a flag, he was bigger than life.  And Cassie had to admit that Kon was right.  No matter when she saw the man with the big red and gold 'S' shield on his chest, he seemed to project a bizarre aura of both trust and inapproachability.  Like he was both the most human person in the world and at the same time, the least human.  

    Of course, in the monitor room they'd been escorted to, above and beyond human seemed to be the norm.  The room itself was immense, the darkness pushed back by the light of a multitude of holographic screens that projected scenes from all over the world.  Sitting in a hovering chair as though he was watching each one with scrutiny was the Martian Manhunter.  Every so often, Cassie caught his head turning incrementally, as though one particular screen caught his attention.  But he said nothing.

    He left that to the more human types, apparently, although she wasn't at all sure if Batman should have been included on that list.  He didn't have to say anything.  A look from those pupil-less eyes was more than enough to give her the shivers.   She knew Wonder Woman, of course, and she'd met Green Lantern and Flash when they'd visited the cave.  The Flash had been a little more vocal about Young Justice being unready for responsibility; Green Lantern seemed to be a lot more likable.  And there was Red Tornado, too— as always, the android's face mask gave no indication of what, if anything, he was feeling.  If he was capable of feeling.

    But right now, feelings were apparently brushed aside.  The adults were all business.  Cassie felt almost like she'd stepped into a meeting of the gods.  And yeah, although she'd done that once, she wasn't all that eager to make it a daily occurrence.

      "The JLA merely extended an offer of indefinite sanctuary on the Watchtower, to sort out your thoughts after such a horrible event, as well as for us to discuss how it would be best for you to proceed from here."  Superman continued.  His voice was softer than she remembered it, and she could see sorrow etched on his face.  Despite herself, she was surprised that he cared all that much.  

    "And to offer moral support, if you needed it," Wonder Woman interjected, in a low tone.

    "Agreed." Superman nodded.  "But none of you were in any way required to stay here."

    "So we've got the who's-at-fault of this down," Robin said archly.  "None of us are.  But the point is that Impulse roared out of the Watchtower, and for all we know, he could have thrown himself into deep space."

    "Unlikely."  Batman said.  

    Robin flashed him a look.  "Good.  Then you can trace him down on Earth."

    "Is that the best idea?"  Green Lantern said.  "When— If someone I knew died, I'd... probably want to be by myself for a while."

    "This wasn't just 'someone he knew.'  This was someone that we just found out he cared a lot for."  Robin said, and Cassie could see that he was doing everything he could to hold his temper in check.  "We all want to make sure he's all right.  At the very least, you can do that much, right?"

    "For the leader of a defunct team, you have a lot of orders to throw around."  Batman said quietly.

    Cassie, Kon and Suzie all looked from Batman to Robin, their eyes wide.  The questions thudded around the inside of her head like lead weights.  _Defunct team?  Does he mean us?  _

    For his part, Robin did not answer any of them yet; his jaw set slowly and his eyes narrowed.  "For there to be a team in the first place, you learn not to abandon your friends when they need you.  No, I don't expect Impulse to do anything rash..."

    "That'd be a first."  Flash murmured, _sotto voce._

    "...but by the same token," Robin said, swinging that glare to the Flash, "this isn't exactly an ordinary situation— " 

    "Nor is this."  Came a voice that was soft and shadowy, and somehow crept around the inside of Cassie's head like a cloud of feathery fog.  She shook her head, and saw Kon, Robin and Secret staring at one another with wide eyes.  Apparently she wasn't the only one who felt it.

    "J'onn?"  Superman said as the red lights faded slightly.  He looked up toward the ceiling, as did the assemblage.  Several of the holographic screens shifted to different views, away from media sources and to computer projections, and they backlit the green form of the Martian Manhunter, who sat in the womb chair, his knees drawn almost up to his chest, his hands steepled before his chin.  He glanced down at the collection of heroes, and his red eyes glowed softly.  "I believe this warrants our attention, Superman.  We are receiving signs of seismic disruption.  So far, no injuries have occurred, but there may be aftershocks.  And I do not believe this will be the last."

    Kon's eyebrows rose.  "Oh, yick.  Now we have an earthquake?  Where?  San Fran?  LA?"

    The Manhunter looked at him.  "Chicago."

    Cassie stared.  Batman, in the meantime, made his way to the computer console.  "Localized?"

    "No."  J'onn shook his head.  "My apologies for this intrusion, my friends, but it's far easier to relay the facts to you this way."

    And suddenly, Wonder Girl saw everything.  The screens lit up before her face, although she instinctively knew the face _wasn't her own.  _She heard the reports, saw the alert signals on the JLA monitors, saw and heard the computer displays.  It was an odd feeling, as though her senses had been multiplied a couple hundred times, and she could suddenly sense everything all at one.  

    But she stifled her gasp and watched.  The first alert was a small tremor in Chicago, barely measurable.  Nothing much, on its own— the New Madrid fault could have caused small tremors, even that far north.  But then she heard/saw/felt reports of another tremor outside of Cleveland.  In the northern counties of Pennsylvania.  By Hartford, Connecticut, it was a point-zero-five on the Richter scale.  None of it caused any damage, but if it was continuing to grow...

    Cassie shook her head as the vision faded; her mind suddenly felt like it was filled with cotton; her senses felt muffled compared to a moment ago.  She looked up at the Manhunter.  "No offense, but it's really freaky when you do that."

    "None taken," he responded, in that same serene, yet rumbling, tone.  But he never glanced up from the monitors.

    Batman was already calling up a world map on the main screens, studying it.  

    Superman peered upward.  "Whatever it is, it's cutting a swath, moving generally along a straight path, within a few degrees... and if the data's accurate, it seems to gain strength as it goes."

    "Orbiting weapon?"  Green Lantern asked.

    "Not likely."  Batman said, his eyes narrowing at the screen.  

    "It would almost have to be moving geo-synchronously to keep on such a tight latitude," Superman added.  "And this is moving against the rotation of the Earth.  West to east."

    Cassie looked at the computerized projection, a red line that was crossing the northern United States, into the Atlantic.  And somewhere, in the depths of her mind, she knew what it was.

    Robin voiced what she already knew.  "Impulse."

    Wonder Woman looked at Robin, then the Flash.  "Is that possible, Wally?"

    "It's possible."  Wally said, tapping his chin.  "Relativistic theory says that the faster an object moves, the more mass it gains, upwards to the speed of light, when it converts to energy.  A hundred some-odd pound kid could conceivably go fast enough to set off seismic disturbances.  I know Bart can't attain light-speed, but he can move pretty fast."

    "Fast enough to have him causing a lot of damage in his wake," Superman said.  "Especially in places that are unused to dealing with earthquakes."  

    "To say nothing of running through populated areas..."  Wally's voice trailed off and his eyes narrowed.

    "What is it?"  Green Lantern asked.

    "If that is Impulse, he's traveling on relatively the same line of latitude."  Wally intoned.  

    "We know that," Cassie said, looking at the streak of red as it made its way across the Atlantic, north of the Azores, heading toward the mainland of Europe.

    Wally turned to them.  "Flash Fact, people: Chicago and Rome are on the same latitude." 

    "Oh, _crap._"  Kon breathed.

    "Go, Wally."  Superman said instantly.  "Head him off, if you can.  Find out what he's doing.  If he's running, trying to blow off steam, he—"

    "Time," Secret interrupted.

    The soft voice seemed to cast a spell that brought everyone to instant silence, caused them all to turn and look at the smoky young woman.  

    Cassie found her voice first.  "What, Secret?"

    "Time."  She seemed a little embarrassed by the sudden attention.  "That was the last thing he said before he disappeared.  He was talking about Cissie, about how he missed her, and how they'd just gone out last week, and then he mumbled something and said, 'time', and before I could ask him what he meant, he was just... gone."

    "Time... time..."  Wally murmured, thoughtfully, and then eyes went wide beneath his cowl as he stared at the on-screen map.  "Oh, _hell.  _He _can't _be."  

    "What is it?"  Suzie asked, but there was a burst of speed-force electricity that seemed to grip the air, and a torrent of wind that yanked the smoke clinging to her body along toward the door, and it was only then that Cassie realized Secret was asking the question to an after-image.

    Robin straightened out his cape, looking from the fading form of the Flash to the empty doorway as the wind of Wally's wake slowly died.  "Someone has to say it.  Holy _déjà vu_."

    Secret pulled herself back together with effort and frowned.  "I swear I think they do that just to see if I'll blow away on the breeze.  Where did he go?"

    No one could answer that for five solid seconds, and then the JLA comlink crackled to life over the loudspeakers. 

    "Flash to Watchtower."

    Although the Martian Manhunter was on monitor duty, it was Superman who answered.  "We read you.  Where are you?"

    "Just blazed through the Swiss Alps.  About ten seconds outside of Zurich, and then straight into France, then the Mediterranean.  I'm on an intercept course with him; I'll try to catch him outside of Rome.  I think I know what he's doing."  

    Wally's voice cut through the roar of wind, but Cassie still winced slightly— it was like listening to someone talking on a car-phone on the freeway with the window rolled down.  She muttered.  "Care to share with the class?"

    "And that is?"  Superman asked.

    "Two words."  Wally said over the clamor of air rushing past at twice the speed of sound.  "Time travel." 


	5. Redemption

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

**Disclaimer:** All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.  I am not making any profit from their use.  "A Moment Too Late, Chapter Five" contains the daily recommended allowances of iron, potassium, and protein, as well as enriched wheat flour, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, dextrose, citric acid, artificial colors, dyes and flavors, and monosodium phosphate.  

**Author Notes:**  Put a CD on.  Draw up a chair.  Sit.  Read and hopefully enjoy; review if you're up to it.  As for me, I'm hoping the ending makes it all worth it for all of you who have wanted to choke the life out of me for not finishing this fast enough.  Apologies in advance for any translations into French that don't come out right; I had to resort to Babelfish on Alta Vista, which is usually hit or miss. Speaking of... hopefully, everything makes sense in the end.  If it doesn't, public floggings are allowed every Monday through Friday from 3 pm to 6 pm CST.  

* * * * *

FIVE – Redemption

    _Now..._

    Barcelona blurred past, its colors and sights distorting like a bleeding painting, as he burned through the main bypasses and switched onto the rural routes with only instinct to guide him.  Soon the cityway gave way to the water of a large sea— the Mediterranean, he thought— but he never stopped.  He kept pumping, one foot in front of the other, racing over the surface like a skipping stone.

    Bart wasn't even sure how long he'd been running anymore.  He remembered being in the Watchtower, and he remembered kneeling in front of the stasis tube that held the icy form of the warmest woman he knew.  And he vaguely remembered talking to Secret.  And then, the idea had struck him like a lightning bolt, and everything else suddenly raced out of his mind.  He wasn't even sure how he managed to find the teleport stations and get himself back down to Earth.  It must have been instinctual, because right now, he couldn't focus his mind on anything else but his plan.

    And the memories.

    _"Bart," she said, smiling over her plate of pasta primavera— or at least he thought it was pasta primavera.  He wasn't at all sure how to pronounce half the stuff on the menu; he'd had to point and smile and hope that the waiter (he forgot, was he called a signor?) knew what he was talking about, because he didn't hear many people speaking English. _

_    She fiddled with her fork. "This is really... uhm,  nice."_

_    Then she paused, mouthed the words again and groaned softly._

_    Bart blinked a couple times, watching as her cheeks went all red momentarily and her eyelids dropped back down to her plate, as if in utter embarrassment.  _

_    "I thought it was, too."  He said.  "What's wrong?" _

_    "It's just..." A small smile.  "It's just that it sounds so... cliché, I guess... when I say it like that.  Like you've taken me to a burger place instead of... well, halfway across the world.  Do you do this on all your first dates?"_

_    "I couldn't tell you.  I don't go on many."  He shuffled his feet under the table.  Sitting still and just eating at normal speed was taking a toll, but he was determined not to show it.  "Uhm, Cissie?  Is this a first date?"_

_    She looked up at him, the cheeks again coloring like perfect ripe apples.  A smile peeked from beneath her nose, and she reached for her glass of water.  "Well, I guess so.  I mean, we've been to a dance before, but nothing like this... by ourselves.  Why do you ask?"_

_    "Well..."  He looked down at his own plate; he'd only taken a few bites of the veal medallion and the pasta, himself.  "Uhm.  Does this mean you're my girlfriend?"_

_    Timing was another concept Bart hadn't quite gotten the knack of.  In this case, it coincided perfectly with her taking a sip of water.  He began to think it was a bad time to ask only when her eyes bugged, and she gasped, choked, and started coughing until her face turned pink.  Or at least, more pink.  _

_    Bart dropped his napkin and was pounding her on the back before it ever touched the floor.  "Geez, Cissie, are you all right?"_

_    "Bart... Slow... down," she croaked._

_    Bart clapped her back more slowly.  "Like this?"_

_    "No," she said hoarsely, then shook her head, wiped tears from her eyes and cleared her throat.  She looked at him as he saw that she was okay and made his way back around the table to his seat_

_    After a moment, she pushed her plate aside and looked at him with those luminous blue eyes.  "I mean, slow down... Oh, heck.  You're not really familiar with this, are you, Bart?"_

_    "No," he admitted, and found his foot tapping at superspeed.  He cringed and focused back on her.  "I mean, the menu's in Italian, and this is my first time really visiting, and... oh, grife, what if they don't take American money here?  Never mind that, though; I'll just— "_

_    She hushed him with a glance.  "I mean male-female relations."_

_    "Oh, that."  He looked at the small candle-lamp, his plate, anywhere but her face, and slowly, his arm came up so he could scratch the back of his head.  "Uhm.  Sorta."_

_    "Hey.  Look at me."  When he did, he was surprised to find understanding there, not disapproval or distress.  "It's nothing to be ashamed about. You probably haven't had much chance to learn, right?"_

_    "Not really."  Bart admitted._

_    "Well, let me tell you something about girls you may not want to hear.  But it's really true, most of the time, and it applies to everything, Bart."  She folded her hands.  "Slow and steady wins the race."_

_    "Max put you up to this, didn't he?"  Bart asked, raising an eyebrow._

_    She giggled at that.  "No.  Not at all.  Think about it, though.  A girl likes to think she's special.  At least, I know I do.  If you take time with her, don't rush calling her a girlfriend or anything else, show her that she's worth the time and effort you spend on her, that helps to make her feel that much more special."_

_    Bart slowly nodded, then his brow quirked curiously.  "How do you mean that applies to everything?"_

_    She touched her chin.  "Have you ever heard of the saying, 'If something's worth doing, it's worth being done right?'"_

_     "Max lives by that one, I think."  He scowled slightly.  "That's why some nights I end up doing my homework three or four times." _

_    "But if you'd taken your time with it, not rushed it?"  She asked, pointedly._

_    Bart glanced at her and grinned.  "Max would wonder who I was and when the aliens made off with me."_

_    She smirked.  "So would a lot of us, actually.  But it would help you, in the long run."_

_    Bart looked at his plate for a moment, thinking.  Slow down?  Max was always talking like that, and as much as Bart admitted Max was usually right about a lot of stuff in the end, it just always felt wrong.  He tried to force himself to slow down on occasion, but it was like his body and mind were so geared toward superspeed that to do anything else just left it champing at the bit to go faster._

_    Maybe that was what caused him to get into trouble so often, he thought.  Maybe Cissie was right, slowing down was the answer to a lot of problems.  And if he needed to slow down with her, he could practice by applying it to other things, and—_

_    He stared down at his leg._

_    His feet had stopped tapping._

_    He blinked and made an instant decision._

_    "I'll try."  He said, with quiet forcefulness.  "For you."_

_    "For me?"  She echoed, her blue eyes wide.  The blush was back anew._

_    "Yeah," he said, very matter-of-factly.  "If it makes you feel special, then it's a good thing."_

_    He paused, and smiled.  "Because you really are special, Cissie."_

    "You really are special, Cissie," he murmured, blinking salt spray and tears from his eyes.

    And then, very suddenly, his stomach was on fire.  

    Bart nearly gagged, his hands quickly switching from their pumping motion to pressing hard into his midsection as his eyes watered from the feeling.  The water splashed below his speed-blurred feet, eager to lap him up and swallow him whole at his first misstep.  But even through the pain, he didn't quit running, kept rushing over the Mediterranean Sea like a low-flying cruise missile, never slowing, never altering his course.  He clenched his teeth and forced the pain aside. 

    It was about then that he began to feel the first stings of pain in his arms, as well, like a dull dagger was pricking at points and embedding into his skin and twisting in others.  He grunted in pain and clamped his jaw so tightly shut he thought his teeth would break.  But he kept running, never slowing.  

    Two more small islands and a cruise ship blurred by.  The colors of the sandbars and the ship's flags were beginning to blueshift in his vision.  _Keep going, keep going.  _He cursed himself.  _I'm coming, Cissie._

    The muscles in his legs began to cramp and needle.  It took a supreme force of will to continue pressing on, but somehow he did, spurred onward by a vision of a blonde bowgirl frozen solid in a stasis cylinder, the memories he had with her, and the future they'd never have together.

    The stabbing fingers in his abdomen tightened their grip.  He growled through clenched teeth, forced himself not to let the agony show, as if that would spur the stabbing feelings on.

    It didn't matter, though, he thought to himself; whatever was hurting him couldn't be any worse than the pain of reliving the memories he and Cissie had shared such a short time ago.  

    The pain might twist his stomach, cramp his legs.  But that was physical.  The memories clutched at his heart and held it tight, and it was infinitely worse.

* * *

    "You're kidding."  Kon said, his eyes wide.

    "About which part?  The time or the travel?"  Wally deadpanned over the loudspeakers in the monitor room of the Justice League Watchtower.  The background sounds of traffic and cityscapes had given way to new sounds— the warped Doppler effect of waves being left far behind, the steady tread of the Flash's feet.  

    Cassie looked up at the monitor and saw the blinking icon that represented him dropping down from France into the Mediterranean Sea, on an intercept course with the glowing red line that marked Impulse's path.  She wondered, offhandedly, how they could hear him so well considering he was moving faster than the speed of sound, and decided it must have to do with the protective aura Bart talked about. 

    "I don't know if he's thinking he has no reason to stay here now and is trying to bounce back into the thirtieth century,"  Wally continued, over the speakers, "or if he's trying to step back a few hours or days and change the past."

    "Either way," Superman said.  "Is that possible for him?"

    "Possibly the first."  Wally said curtly.  "Max Mercury's skipped into the future by skirting the edge of the Speed Force, but in his case he heard the calling and blinked.  I don't know what Bart's mindset is like.  That might not happen if he does manage to gain the speed.  He may enter the Speed Force, instead."

    Cassie's eyes went wide.  She'd heard Bart talk about how Johnny Quick _entered the Speed Force.  _A friendly euphemism for _going beyond._  _Dying._

    Robin spoke up.  "Could he go back in time?"

    "He doesn't have that kind of speed."  Flash said.  "Traveling backward through time would require traveling faster than light.  As fast as he can move, that's still beyond him."

    "Faster than light.  Like a tachyon," Superman said, thoughtfully.  "And he can't travel faster than light without becoming energy himself. Right?"

    "Right."  Flash replied.  "I managed it once, but only because I yanked myself into the Speed Force and merged with it.  And even if I mainline the Force, that's not a trip I'm anxious to make again.  No offense."

    Superman nodded sagely.  

    "Ah, there we go."  Wally said after a couple moments of quiet.  "I have visual contact.  It's definitely Impulse.  Catching up with him now."

    There was a moment of silence— or at least, vocal silence, as there was still noise.  The channel was literally awash with the sound of the wind rushing past and the steady splash of feet, and a sound like a roar that came closer and closer, as the Flash apparently neared Impulse.  The roar was slowly replaced by a scream.  A human scream.

    And then Wally's voice came over the speakers again, but in a soft, stunned tone.

    "Holy _God,_" he whispered.

* * *

    Bart Allen was not necessarily predisposed toward believing in God.  In fact, seeing Cissie hit by her own arrow and pronounced dead would have done little toward making him believe in any sort of all-powerful benevolent power.  But if He actually were out there, Bart would have given his right hand for Him to stop the pain that lanced through him.  

    His legs were feeling like someone else's: the muscles felt tight and heavy, and shot daggers up his waist with his every step.  His lungs were starting to feel like he couldn't get enough air into them, his breaths were starting to become ragged.  His spine and his arms and his head— and even his face— hurt as if hot needles had been jammed throughout his body.

    But he kept running nonetheless, even forcing himself to pick up speed, forcing himself to focus on running and going faster every moment to forget the pain.  

    _"Slow down," _she said, through the haze of memory.

    _No!  _He shook his head, cleared the thought.  _Faster!  Faster!_  

    Flickers of electricity began to coruscate around him, charging the surface of his frictionless aura.  The seawater began to part before him moments before his feet displaced it.  The air behind him broiled in his windburn.  And as if the speed was like a fan to their fire, the stabbing pains began to flare more and more.

    The image of Cissie in the cryo-tube blurred before his vision, and so did the world, but his feet kept pumping and his jaw stayed clenched tightly shut— so tightly he could taste blood.  He couldn't help but think that this all felt _familiar,_ somehow.  

    The dagger in his stomach twisted again, harder, and the thought was gone, like dry grass in a roaring brush fire.  Bart Allen screamed in anguish, nearly bending double as he grasped his stomach.

    _"Bart..._ _Slow... down."  _The memory said, in Cissie's voice.

    Bart shook his head, twisting his neck this way and that.  His legs kept pace, running as if it was all they could do.  _Can't slow down!  CAN'T stop!  You need me! _

    And that was when he heard the explosion of the sound barrier bursting beside him, and he opened his eyes to look into the astonished face of Wally West.

* * *

    Nothing surprised the Fastest Man Alive anymore.

    There were reasons for that, of course, and joining the Justice League had a lot to do with it.  A Rogue's Gallery consisting of crooks who used rubber chickens, mirrors and scientific tech to knock over banks and jewelry stores just tends to look commonplace when, say, you've beaten your first giant killer starfish or held off a couple invasions by White Martians.  

    Since he'd hooked up with the Magnificent Seven, plus or minus a few, Wally West had helped to stop Kobra's worldwide takeovers.  He'd helped save Manhattan from becoming the Queen of Fables' fairy-tale world.  He'd traveled through time and connected himself with the Speed-Force more times than he could count.  He'd even helped stave off Earth's extermination by Mageddon, a creature that bred mindless war and apparently had whacked a few gods along the way to the Sol system.

    Comparatively speaking, Bart losing it and causing small-scale earthquakes by running at top speed around the globe was a slight step worse than an afternoon off for the Flash.  

    He didn't like to think of it that lightly, however, he decided as he blew through low-country France, the roads becoming flanked by blurring farms and vineyards and the southern border looming a hundred miles or so ahead.  He _liked _Bart.  Sure, the kid was obstinate, acted without thinking, too curious for his own good; he sometimes tended to be generally irresponsible and just didn't understand what 'normal speed' meant.  But overall, he wasn't a bad kid, normally.  He had a lot of good points.  He was honest, nice to most people, quick to stick up for his friends.

    The fact that Impulse was generally a good kid was what caused Wally to worry most.  Wally wasn't completely stupid, despite what Linda said once in a while, and little things were starting to add up in his head.  Take one, Bart had asked him about girls, specifically how he knew he was in love... and one, Arrowette had been frozen solid, and was now, at worst, inert... and one, Bart was now running roughshod across the globe, maybe trying to travel back in time...  Even to a butthead speedster like him, one plus one plus one still equaled three.  

    He was pretty certain the young speedster had some fairly strong feelings for the young archer.  And even if he'd learned a bit about death, there was a whole world of difference between knowing about it on a conceptual level and dealing with it when it took someone you cared deeply about.  He just hoped he reached Bart before the boy did anything rash in his grief.

    "You're kidding," said a stunned voice in his wing-radio.  Wally recognized it as Superboy.  

    "About which part?  The time or the travel?"  He said.  The beaches of southern France stretched out in front of him, a line of white-yellow sand that grew closer, thick and wide with each passing step, a barrier between him and the calm blue-green of the Mediterranean.  He sighed to himself.  _Crap.  Sand is always such a pain in the butt.  Loose footing, hard to turn... have to be careful.  Wrong step and I'm skipping off the water all the way into Algeria._

    "I don't know if he's thinking he has no reason to stay here now and is trying to bounce back into the thirtieth century or if he's trying to step back a few hours or days and change the past."  Wally reported.  It wasn't exactly a lie, but Wally had a pretty good idea what Bart was doing, and he doubted the thirtieth century had anything to do with it. 

    Superman asked if it was possible, however, and Wally grated out a brusque response as the hard-packed street gave way in the next second to the rougher, sandy roads leading to the public beaches.  You just didn't lie to the Big Guy.  Or Batman, for that matter, but that was different: you trusted one, and feared the other.  He answered the questions and comments after that as succinctly as possible, focusing on his footing and the throngs of people in the beachside resort areas.

_    Tourist season on the Mediterranean.  Figures._

    It cost Wally a whole ten seconds to find a good line from the beach edge to the sea, and he cursed just about every hundredth of a second he didn't see one.  But finally, through the lines of swimsuit-togged sunbathers, tourists, surfers, in-line skaters and vendors, he saw a line of bare sand and veered for it unerringly, already pouring on the speed.  White sand speed-fused into glass in his footprints before it was swallowed by the spray of his wake.  The water's edge was less than a hundred yards ahead.

    And then right in front of him, springing up from the water less than thirty feet out was a man with a thick mustache, a pudgy face and far too much pot belly for the black Speedo he was wearing.  He rubbed the water from his closed eyes, smiling deliriously and pointing to his head, where an ill-fitting toupee clung on tenaciously.  He whooped: "Ha ha! M'avez-vous vu, Jill? Et mes cheveux sont restés attachés!"

    And then he opened his eyes and saw a streak of scarlet heading right for him.  The pot-bellied man barely had time to inhale a gasp.

    "Jeez!"  Wally yelled, and with no time to react, he did the only thing he could, and _leapt, _the trailing edge of his boot just barely clearing the man's head.  It was a near thing.  Wally almost lost his balance, but hung on and continued running, the water spray parting around him like a miniature mockup of Moses and the Red Sea.

    "Excusez-moi!"  Wally twisted and yelled back, only vaguely hearing the man's cries of "Ce qui au nom de _l'enfer?  Merde!  Merde!  Merde!_" as he made a dive for his toupee, after the burst of wind from Wally's slipstream sent it fluttering from his head and out to sea.

    Wally shook his head wryly and turned back toward the horizon, altering his course eastward.  It only took him a couple moments after he did so to see the familiar blur of white and red, like a mirror image of him kicking up a spray of water as he ran across the Mediterranean's surface.__

    "Ah, there we go," Wally said, kicking himself into still another higher gear to pull closer to the young speedster.  "I have visual contact.  It's definitely Impulse.  Catching up with him now."

    He looked closer.  Something was off about Bart, and it wasn't just the fact he was running in his Impulse uniform with the mask off.  He was running fast, but his running style was... awkward... clumsy.  Wally knew what a runner, especially a speedster, tended to look like when they ran, and Bart just didn't look like he had his usual, flowing movements.  

    Wally drew closer, almost alongside, and then he saw.  His arms weren't moving, pumping, like a runner.  Instead, they were clenched to his stomach and Bart was running as though he was cramping up or holding his insides in.  

    Wally's eyes narrowed.  To keep continuing at this speed, if he was cramping up this bad, he must have been running almost on willpower alone.  _Oh, God, poor kid.  _

    He reached out a hand to Bart and put on even more speed, ready to steady the kid, ready to help, ready to say whatever it would take to slow him down.  

    He wasn't at all ready to see Bart suddenly scream raggedly, and bend far lower than a runner ever would, almost like he was about to violently heave.        How he kept his footing at all was beyond Wally.  But somehow he did, and shook his head wildly from side to side as the scream slowly gave way.

    And then his pain-twisted face came into view, the eyes and teeth clenched tightly shut.  And even as Bart's eyes opened, Wally's widened still further as he looked at Impulse.

    "Holy _God,_" he breathed, forgetting he was still connected to the Watchtower.

    It wasn't just the running style that appeared ungainly and wrong.  It was Bart himself.  The kid had always been slightly tall for his supposed age, but now he was beyond even that; he may have been a good head taller than six foot, although as bent over as he was it was hard for Wally to be sure.  But he had filled out, somehow, too.  His legs no longer had the lean, slender build of a child's, they were defined: the muscles were far more obvious now, standing out sharply with each movement of his legs.  His arms bulged with muscle and sinew, and his chest had become broad— the red and white Impulse suit strained against his larger frame.  

    Bart's face was more chiseled now.  The jawline was stronger, more square; and a thin patch of stubble was noticeable on what had once been down-soft cheeks.  His hair might even have been a touch longer, as it whipped behind him, but Bart's hair was always long and unruly.  Wally gawked at Bart as though he was a complete stranger, because in all those respects, he _was.  _

    Finally he managed, in a stunned voice: "Bart?"

    "What?"  Came the grunted reply.  Not just a grunt, but a voice that had matured and aged, a voice that had lost some of its falsetto and gained some baritone.  A voice, in other words, that had bypassed the squeakiness and shakiness of puberty and had thrust its way full-bore into manhood.  

    Just like Bart Allen himself had somehow done.

* * *

    _Elsewhen..._

    "How?"  Waverider finally managed, after the initial shock slipped from his face.  He gazed at the new arrival with an intense black-eyed glare.  "How did you enter this facility?  This place is restricted!  How did you get past our defenses?"

    The brown-haired man's lips split into a wry grin.  "Warm reception.  Especially for a first time visitor.  You were right, Hunter; he's not very cool with the whole idea.  If you have credits here in the outside of time, I owe you ten.  But we're not here to talk about pocket change."

    Matthew stood up, and leveled his arm at the visitor, until he realized he wasn't wearing any of his temporal gear.  He extended a finger in a pointing motion instead.  "Waverider has a perfect right to ask.  This is a secured area, and Vanishing Point is off-limits to visitors.  Who are you and how did you get in here?"

    The man raised his gaze to Hunter, across the table, and rubbed at his scruffy chin.  "Jeez, they really don't know, do they?"

    Hunter shrugged, as if to say, _I haven't told._  Liri Lee watched him closely, her brow furrowing, and then her gaze swung back over to the stranger.

    "Well."  The man tugged at the front of his grey jumpsuit and his eyes took in each of the Linear Men in turn.  "I don't want to keep you in suspense, then.  I appeared here in this big flash of bright white light.  I really thought I had died, but that was okay, because I knew starting out that I was going to die, anyway, so it was no big deal."

    "Flash of light."  Ryder echoed, sarcastically.  "And I suppose the voice of God came after that."

    "No," Hunter said after a moment.  "Actually it was the voice of me."

    All three heads whipped around to Hunter.  The man on the opposite end of the table grinned again.

    "See, he pulled me out into the guest room down the hall and gave me this suit, because my own clothes were kind of ripped up really bad and mostly not there.  Then he asked me if I knew where I was, and I told him I just knew it didn't feel like heaven or hell, either one.  And if it didn't feel like hell, it couldn't be Manchester.

    "And he asked me to explain what happened to me.  The whole story, everything.  And I did.  Everything."

    Hunter nodded, folding his hands in front of him.

    The man smirked.  "And he told me a little about himself and who he worked for.  And then he told something else to me.  Tempus Fugit.   He said that, and told me to wait there, in the guest quarters, while he looked into the information I gave him— I guess to make sure it was correct."

    "Tempus Fugit.  'One who flees time'."  Waverider said in a low voice.

    "Actually," the man said, cocking his head.  "I had a chance to study up on that after he left me in the guest room.  You have a computer information system that's not too hard to get the hang of.  Primo stuff.  So I looked it up, because I had no clue what it meant.  It can mean one who flees time... or just that time flies.

    "But I found something else out, too.  It's Latin.  So if you guys know Latin, you probably have a system of laws and stuff, too, right?"

    "That goes without saying," Ryder shot back.  "But what do you mean, you just looked into our information systems?  Those systems are all passcoded, and..."

    He trailed off when he heard the soft thrum noise coming from the man's end of the table.  At first he stood, thinking it was a weapon, but then he saw the man tapping his fingers on the table.  Not just an ordinary impatient tap, but taps that were faster than the beat of a hummingbird's wings.  The fingers were a blur.  The thrum was the sound of a thousand taps a second with no space in between for the noise to start or stop.

    Liri Lee's eyes began to widen in slow understanding.  "You're... you're..."

    "As for the who, that's a little tougher."  The man interrupted her, gazing around the table with stolid amber eyes.  "See, I'm a representative from the timeline you're trying to protect and maintain.  I'm sort of what you'd consider your very own citizen."  

    His eyebrows lowered.  "And as a representative of that timeline, I'm here, on its behalf, to both defend my actions and take whatever legal action is necessary to let it die."

    Ryder slammed both hands on the table.  "_Legal action?!_  Are you _mad?_  There's no such thing as a _legal action_ that can justify the erasure of a historical timeline!"  

    He began to tap a code into the computer screen in front of him.  "When the Linear Authorities get here, and we stop what you've done..."

    He never finished.  There was a burst of wind that filled the room, and suddenly Matthew was tapping on the table.  He glanced up, saw Waverider and Liri's computer screens had both disappeared, as well.  The main monitor kept happily showing the temporal spike, kept spitting out data on it, but there was no way to access it without the remote computers.  He slowly glanced to the end of the table, and saw the man sitting there with an apologetic look on his face and a large pile of hardware on the floor next to him that included all the remotes, three pairs of wrist communicators, their temporal inducers, and Matthew's sidearm.  

    The latter had apparently been used to spot-weld the doors, as Liri found when they wouldn't open.  

    The man looked at them all and folded his hands, sanguinely, as if he was happy to sit there all day, and as far as he was concerned, so would they.  "Well, I'm hoping we can find some sort of legal action, people.  Because I'd really hate to resort to _illegal_ action."

    Hunter draped his hand over his face and groaned softly.

* * *

    _Now..._

    Land came upon them quickly, and the sea gave way to the mainland, as they blasted from the Mediterranean onto the beaches of Italy.  Lightning flashed all around the two, rippling off their auras and sparking through their slipstreams.

    "Don't you see?"  Bart growled, in that shockingly older voice.  "I can't let her die!"

    "Bart..." Wally said, slowly recovering from the shock of seeing the young man as much less 'young' and much more 'man'.  He'd switched off his Justice League communicator after quickly saying that he'd call back and report as soon as he had more information.  "You have to see, yourself.  She's already gone.  There's nothing you can do about that."

    "That's _nnnt_— " he grunted again, teeth clenched tightly, blood starting to trickle down into the stubble that had sprouted from his chin.  His fist trembled as he pressed it to his stomach; he vainly tried to continue pumping his arms.  "That's not true.  She's still alive, just not now."

    Wally chose to ignore that for the time, but he couldn't help but think that the idea was a very un-Bart like one.  _Thinking in four dimensions?  What's next?_  "What I'm worried about right now is you.  What the hell is happening to you?  You look like you're about to fall over!"

    "Don't... _unnnh_..." Bart exhaled a groan, and pulled his arm away from his midsection, looking at it.  "Don't know.  Lot of pain... Body feels like it's on fire.  Like..."

    The amber eyes focused on him and slowly flickered with recognition and memory.  "Like the first time... first time I ran with you.  When you made me run to open myself... _unnnh!... _with the Speed Force."

    "But you're already attuned to it, Bart!"  Wally said, grasping at straws.  He remembered that, when Bart had first arrived along with Iris.  He'd been aging uncontrollably, his super-speed literally eating his life away.  Wally had helped stabilize his speed and metabolism,  connecting him with the Speed Force by forcing him to run as fast as he possibly could, until he felt like he was going to give out, then go even faster.  To use the runner's term, it was forcing him to hit the wall and gain a second wind.  He shook his head, grated to Impulse: "If you're in pain, then for God's sake, stop!  Or at least slow down!  You look ragged!"

    Bart shook his head, his face settling in resolve.  "If I slow down or stop... she dies.  Have to go back."

    _Back to that again._  "You can't just go back in time!  You've got to slow down, Bart!  Look what's happened already, since you've been trying to!  You're running at blueshift speed, for heaven's sake!  You're going so fast that you're causing tremors... when you go through Rome, you might cause who-knows-how-much damage... and that's not even going into what this is doing to you!  You're in obvious pain.  Your muscles are expanding and... hell, Bart, you look eighteen instead of fifteen..."

    He glanced again and trailed off.  _Eighteen?  No, twenty.  _Mental klaxons blared to him as he considered the way Bart looked, the way he was talking, the sense of self-possession he was seeming to gain, little by little.  _Oh, God, that's it— he's aging.  Just like he was before he attuned to the Speed Force. _

    Wally thought that through.  Was it possible?  Ever since Bart Allen had been born, he'd been a speedster.  But in the thirtieth century, he'd been fitted into virtual reality to try to tone down his speed, not realizing that his metabolism was still operating at lightspeed.  He'd aged incredibly fast, and likely would have sped himself right into a pile of withered bones had Aunt Iris not brought him back to the twentieth century and had Wally show him how to stabilize his metabolism.  

    Could that somehow be undone?  Could he be trying to run so fast that the locks and guards that held his metabolism in check could be bypassed?  Could he have come so close to hitting the wall again that it had dislodged his body's hold on its fail-safes?  Could it have affected his mind, having neurons suddenly able to jump twice the synapses they could before?  He didn't know.  But it was looking a hell of a lot like it.

    "Bart, this is aging you again."  He said, quietly urgent. "It's killing you."

    "So what if it does?"  Bart responded, tears starting to roll down his cheeks— from loss, pain or grit, Wally couldn't tell.  "Wally, I _have _to do this.  Don't you understand?  Now there's... no other choice.  It's like before... when you made me run faster... than I ever had, to internalize the speed."  

    "I know."

    "But I've broke that barrier... I'm running faster now."  Bart managed to smile, a flash of white that peered out from above the unshaved chin.  It still looked like a rictus as it twisted through the obvious ache and the tears apparent on his twenty-five year-old face.  "So I have to... what'd you call it... hit the wall... again.  And the next step..."

    He couldn't continue to talk.  His breathing was becoming too worn.

    Wally looked ahead of him, caught the whipping by of a mileage sign, read it at hyper-speed.  Rome was less than two minutes away; probably less, at the speeds they were running.  What sort of tremor would they cause going through?  A one-point-oh?  A two?  What about when they rounded the Earth again?

    "Light speed."  The Flash said tightly, finishing for him.  

    Bart nodded.  "And beyond."

    "You can't do that, Bart."  Wally growled.  "You don't have that kind of speed.  And even if you could, listen to me.  You can't go back and change time just to make her come back.  That's what Hal did and— "

    Bart swung at him.  It was a flailing punch, and even had Bart been in his best shape it probably would have come nowhere near connecting; let alone now, when he was so wracked with pain that running at all was becoming a chore.  He was just lashing out, throwing a punch borne of hurt and anger and frustration.

    But it took Wally by surprise.  He'd never seen Bart look as angry as he did when the young man— young being a temporary state, it seemed— glared at him.  It was as if he was trying to burn Wally alive with the heat of his stare.

    "Bullshit!"  Bart yelled at the Flash, his voice strained.  "I don't _care_ about Hal Jordan and what he did and what happened because of it!  I'm telling you I _have _to save her!  I _love_ her!"

    "I don't doubt that, Bart," Wally said exasperatedly.  "But messing with the past— "

    "_You look at me!"  _Impulse screamed, lightning burning in his amber eyes.  "Don't give me that holier-than-thou crap about the timelines and what we can and can't do, Wally!  Don't sit there and spout JLA rhetoric when we _both _know better!  _Goddammit, you look me in the eyes and tell me if it was Linda you wouldn't be doing the exact same damned thing!"_

* * *

    Wally West's eyes narrowed after Bart had lashed out at him.  And as the young man watched, for a moment too small to realize, all the pain was gone from his slowly aging frame as he thought maybe, just maybe, Wally saw his point.  But as the Flash slowly dipped his head in acknowledgement and then began to shake it, the moment was over before it began.  

    "Bart... you just can't do it."  Wally said softly, the words like a death knell.

    Something gave way in Bart then.  He'd never be able to outrun Wally, never be able to get to light speed and beyond if he had a fight on his hands, not at the way he was aging.  All the anger and irritation had already boiled up within him, and now it began to evaporate all at once, replaced by the pain of his body, the grief he'd kept tightly bottled in his heart.  Tears rushed to his eyes, blurred his vision.  _I'm really sorry, Cissie.  I'm going to fail.  God, I'm so sorry._

    He managed to look over at the Flash, and in a choked voice, murmured, "fucking hypocrite."

    To Bart's surprise, Wally didn't act surprised, angered or hurt; he just smiled softly at him.  "Nice language, kid.  Guess you're old enough to use it now.  But I think you're misunderstanding me.  I mean you yourself can't do it..."

    Flickers of energy coruscated over their running frames.  Wally reached a hand out toward him, lightning ablaze on his fingertips.  The Speed Force arced around him, leaping from Wally's fingers to wrap itself around Bart's invisible aura.

    Wally smirked and finished: "...not without some help."

    And then, very suddenly, the pain was a distant memory, as the energy washed around him, and Bart realized that Wally had _lent him speed_.  He looked at the energy coursing off his body with wide eyes, and then glanced at Wally.

    The Flash began to lag behind, smiling all the while.  "Don't thank me!  Just go!"

    Bart felt a new upper limit calling him, a velocity that had been thus far untouchable to him.  With wide amber eyes, limbs that felt lighter and faster than ever before, and a new sense of awe filling him, he embraced it, let the speed take hold of him.

    And then he was gone.

    As objects seemed to stretch and skew in his vision, Bart realized that all this time, all his years, he thought he knew what speed was.  He had no idea.  It was as if he had suddenly discovered he had been redlining and just then realized there was an all-new gear he could shift into to give himself more throttle.  The moisture in the air behind him evaporated; the hydrogen burst into flame.  His every footstep carbonized the ground.  The colors of the world became bright and transcendental, shifting in hue until everything began to form into a singular white.  And then the white itself brightened further until it was nothing more than light and energy, and the world was left behind, the light and energy all joining together in the extra-dimensional Valhalla called the Speed Force.  Its energies flickered around him, urging him onward.   

    The speed of light beckoned, and he blew through it like a runaway truck through a rice-paper barricade, his body transfiguring itself into pure Speed Force energy.  He raced alongside tachyons, watched time stop and then reverse itself, first by seconds, then minutes and hours.  And all the while his thoughts kept pace with his velocity.

    But two occupied him the most.

    _I'm coming, Cissie._

    And _My name is Bart Allen.  I'm the Fastest Man Alive._

* * *

    _Then..._

    Volcano looked as though he'd barely tossed Kon.  He didn't over-extend, the way Cissie had hoped he might have, but he did follow through, and for a moment, at least, he was exposed.  It wasn't the shot she would have wanted.  But it was likely the only shot she was going to get.

    And so Cissie King-Jones— the heroine known as Arrowette— released the most fateful shaft of her entire young life.  The bowstring sang like a chorus, and the arrow sped, straight and true, for Volcano's midsection.  The blue liquid snugly captured in the fragile cylindrical arrowhead seemed to wash forward, as if sensing its freedom.

    And then the arrow stopped, a scant inch from its target, plucked from midair by a meaty hand.

    Cissie's eyes widened.

    Volcano's follow-through had not left him open after all; instead, he had merely tossed Kon and then brought his hand back, with a speed that defied belief and caught the arrow by the shaft, half an instant before the arrowhead impacted.  

    The large red man looked at the arrow as though he was studying its construction, and then, his red eyes flicked up to its owner.  He never once said a word as he released it back to its sender.

    She did, however.  Two, in fact.  "Aww, _crud._"

* * *

    Secret felt it first, the way the air felt thick and heavy and just... _charged_ somehow.  It distracted her momentarily, as did something on the edge of her hearing: a low-pitched noise, like a distant hum or a very low buzzing.

    It worried her.  They were here in a lab with who-only-knew-_what­ _equipment, so she figured the last thing anyone wanted to hear was a buzz or a hum or something godawful like that.  And worse, it seemed like it was building.

    Or getting closer.

    Her face appeared in the smokiness that was mostly obscuring Volcano from view.  

    "Robin, do you hear that?"  She asked, worriedly.

    Robin crouched, dodging one of the laser-like heat blasts.  He touched a stud and telescoped his rod.  "Hear what?"  

    "That hum!"  Secret said, her head and neck extending from the smoke.  "You can't hear— "

    It was then that she saw Volcano hurl the arrow back at Cissie, and just like that, the hum of whatever-it-was faded instantly from her mind.  "Oh, no..."__

* * *

    "Superboy!"  Cassie exclaimed as she flashed around Volcano, her fists held high.  "Put him down, you— "

    She never got the next word out, because at that moment Volcano hurled the thrashing Kon-El at her, so fast that Wonder Girl had no chance to catch him.  

    She might have been able to avoid him, but she dimly realized that something was... different in the air.  Like it was heavier, thicker, like the humidity was climbing or something.  The realization didn't occupy her for more than a split instant, but that fraction of a moment was more than enough. 

    Kon smacked right into her, and the two crashed into the heavy wall of the lab with a sickening thud.  After what felt like an eternity, they slowly found their way to the floor, sliding down in an awkward tumble of arms and legs.

    Cassie shook her head, dazedly checking her wig.  It was still on, may all the gods bless it.  She was definitely going to look into a new uniform, and soon.

    "Hera," she mumbled, feeling aches in places she didn't know she had body parts.

    Kon lifted his head muzzily, rubbed at his face.  "I don't get it.  See what?"

    Cassie looked at him, her eyebrows furrowing.  "What do you mean?"

    He looked at her and tasted blood on his split lip.  "What'd you say 'see' for?  See what?  What'd I do?"

    "You're punch-drunk.  I didn't say 'see'."  She helped him to his feet.

    Kon blinked.  "Wait, there it is again.  S'not you, and it's not saying 'see'.  I can barely hear it.  It's..."

    "Later!"  Wonder Girl interrupted, and then she turned back to Volcano, only to see him in follow-through, Arrowette's liquid-nitrogen arrow already thrown, straight and true, at her best friend.  Her eyes went wide. "Hera, _no!_"

    Kon clambered to his feet, stunned into immobility by the sight.  But he knew right then what the sound on the edge of his enhanced hearing seemed to be saying, because Cassandra Sandsmark was echoing that very same word.

    "_Ciiiissiiiiiiieeeeee!_"

* * *

    As Volcano threw it, the arrow hung in mid-air, as if it would stay there, forever.

    It just.  Hung.  There.  

    Instinctively, Bart knew it was moving.  It _had _to be.  And just as instinctively, he knew he would never be able to catch it, even as he pulled himself from the ground.  He knew it was going to hit her.  It was going to hit Cissie.

    Cissie, who couldn't vibrate her molecules or change herself to a vapor form to allow it to pass through harmlessly.

    Cissie, who wasn't super-strong like Kon or Cassie, who didn't have any sort of invulnerability to cold.

    Cissie, who was backed up against the wall and couldn't get away, who didn't have speed-of-light reflexes to catch the arrow the way Volcano did.

    Cissie, who—

    "No!"  Bart screamed.  The air in the room seemed to get heavier, like the feeling of the charged sky before a storm, but Bart didn't notice as he leapt to his feet in a space of time that made electrons look sluggish.  His heart hammered as his legs started to pump, his fingers nearly brushing the fletchings of the arrow in the first moment.

    He never once saw the foot of Volcano.  It was hard to say whether the large man meant to trip him or not.  

    Bart's flailing fingertips came so near the fletchings that he could literally feel the air molecules being displaced by the arrow's wake.  They came that near, and still fell short.  Bart Allen sprawled to the floor, not even protecting himself from the fall.  His chin cracked hard into the tile, and he tasted blood.

    "Nuh—!" he yelled, a yell abruptly cut short.

    By the time he could pick himself up again, he'd missed damned near everything.

* * *

    Cissie saw the arrow coming for her, and had already started to move, but even as she did, she knew she'd never get out of the way in time.  It was Harm all over again, she thought, only this time, there was no such thing as a flesh wound.  She knew her arrows; the liquid nitrogen arrows were different than her cryo-arrows— which were fairly harmless, in their own way.  These would coat an area in enough liquid nitrogen to crystallize a Cadillac.    

    Time seemed to slow down; everything came into sudden and crystal-clear focus around her, and it was at that moment that Cissie King-Jones realized she wasn't going to escape.  This was it.  The end.  The last chapter.  

    In the split second she had to catalogue her short life, she heard Cassie shrieking her name, Robin's inhaled gasp, and Bart screaming "No!" in a voice that sounded like a badly warped tape.  She felt the air seem to grow thick, as he made a stab for the arrow, his fingers falling breathtakingly short before he tripped and slammed to the floor.

    _Figures.  Everyone else has a knight in shining armor.  My hero trips over his feet on the way to my rescue.  Where the hell's the justice in that?_

    The fragile arrowhead loomed in her vision; she could feel the hardness of the wall behind her, and a last, tiny warm surge in her heart for the speedster that sprawled to the ground in slow motion.  She heard a noise on the edge of her hearing, a buzz that increased in pitch and volume to a whine.  

    A static charge seemed to fill the room, and even as time seemed to slow to a halt around her, the whine became a voice, and the crackle of electricity filled the air and the voice became clear to her ears.

    _"CIIIIISSSSSSSSSSIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"_

    Too stunned to think of anything else, Cissie King-Jones' last thought on Earth became, _What the hell, does anyone else want to give away my secret identity before I kick off?_

    And then something exploded through the wall next to her with the boom of a thunderclap— a body, phasing through the wood, steel and plaster harmlessly, as though it were made of air— before turning on a dime and ripping back past her with a speed that would have left lightning with an inferiority complex.  

    Time started.  The liquid-nitrogen arrow tore through the scant remaining foot of air and its fragile head shattered, its contents spraying outward and flash-freezing the wall, leaving a ten-foot wide area of it as little more than ice.

    Absent from the wall was Arrowette, who managed to finally inhale the gulp of air she'd been subconsciously holding back gasping.  Now she gasped for a different reason however; not only was she noticeably still alive, but from one moment to the next she found herself away from the wall and across the room, safe and snug in the well-muscled arms of a rakishly handsome long-haired man in a shredded red and white uniform that revealed more than it covered.  The man's amber eyes sparkled through an electric haze, and a wry grin touched his lips, revealing an even white row of teeth through the darkness of his unshaved face.  The energy that sparked in his eyes wafted around them both like a storm of heat lightning, flickering around his limbs and yet not at all hurting her.  But even with all the extra age, the more firm build, the ripped clothing, and the odd energy, there was something more than just familiar about him.  She knew that even before he spoke.

    "Still want to take it slow?"  He asked.

    "Uhm?"  Cissie mumbled, blinking several times at him, and gazing at him with wide blue eyes.

    His expression became a little more concerned.  "Are you all right?"

    "Ah...?"  Cissie mumbled, blinking several times, and once even rubbing them, then continuing to gaze at him with wide blue eyes.

    His brows furrowed at her.  "You can say something besides 'Uhm' and 'Ahh', right?"

    "Uhh..."  Cissie mumbled, and then after a long moment, she found a smaller, slightly higher voice, if that was at all possible.  "Bart?"

    He smiled and slowly set her down, hesitantly, as if he didn't want to.  His hands left her with agonizing slowness.  "Stay here."  

    The man seemed to flicker for a few moments, but Cissie had been around speedsters long enough to realize that he had left and returned before his after images had quit strobing.  The main reason she knew that was because when he returned, he wasn't facing her.  She couldn't see his arms, but from his stance, she assumed they were crossed in front of his chest.  (_And yikes_, she thought, _what a chest!_)  He was facing the thief that a moment ago she had been sure was going to be her killer.

    His eyes were apparently fixed on Volcano, who looked surprised by this latest turn of events, but seemed content enough with quiet that he didn't feel the need to say so.  

    "Big strong guy, to pick on kids."  The man said, and Cissie had to admit it even _sounded _like Bart, just with a deeper, more sure voice than she'd ever heard Impulse use.  "Wanna try a grown-up?"

    Young Justice seemed stunned into inaction, just watching the standoff like spectators of a high noon gunfight.  Even Robin was speechless.  Cissie saw Bart pick himself up slowly, look to the frozen wall and then to her and her savior, and gawk.

    The older him— if it was indeed him— paid them no notice.  He merely smirked, and then he wound up and grunted, hurling a heavy object that he'd apparently kept hidden with his arms at Volcano.  The overhead lights glinted red off the metal cylinder.

    "Don't!"  She cried, before she could stop herself.  "He'll just— "

    Again Volcano's thick hand reached out and snared the projectile before it could touch him.  He held it firmly in his hand and then merely shook his head slowly from side to side as if bemoaning the futility of such an attack.  Then his red eyes focused back on the new arrival and narrowed.

    "—catch it."  Cissie finished, groaning.

    The older Bart never lost his smirk.  "Nice reflexes.  Idiot."

    Something in the tone caused Volcano's brow to furrow, and looked more closely at the metal cylinder.  His red eyes slowly widened as he saw what it was: a fire extinguisher.  A Halon fire extinguisher.

    It was at that point that the casing of the extinguisher, held for a few moments too long in Volcano's superheated grasp, buckled and ruptured, and with the muffled sound of a tightly-wrapped explosion, a huge cloud of white gas completely filled the entire corner of the room.  There was a roar of pain from within, and as the cloud slowly dissipated, Volcano still stood there, but he was pale and shaking, looking like a victim of oxygen deprivation.  His red eyes bulged, but they were a darker red now, missing their glow.  He was choking, trying to draw breath.  And the heat aura around him was gone.

    For only the second time, he spoke, in a voice that sounded far less like a monster and more like a befuddled child.  "Wha... wha—?"

    The older Bart had turned away; now he glanced back over his shoulder at Volcano.  

    "Halon 1301.  Firefighting chemical of choice.  Low toxicity and boiling point, useful for the suppression of chemical and electrical fires by sealing off the oxygen from the flames.  No oxygen, no fuel.  No fuel, no fire."  His lips quirked upward, fractionally, and his amber eyes glinted.  "Flash Fact."

    Volcano might have grunted more, but at that point, he was tapped on the shoulder and swiveled around to find Superboy and Wonder Girl both raising their fists at him, looking hurt, a bit bloody and— moreover— very, very disgruntled.

    Any response the would-be tech thief might have had to his science lesson was lost shortly after he was punched through the wall into the next lab.

* * *

    "You're... you're me?"  Bart said in a low, wondering voice, as he looked up into the face of the older man that had saved Cissie.  The rest of the team had gone into the next lab to restrain and shackle up Volcano, and Robin had gone upstairs to the roof and the Super-Cycle to alert the authorities and inform Red Tornado.  That had left Impulse and Arrowette with the man that Cissie said for all intents and purposes looked just like an older version of Bart.

    Bart wasn't sure.  He could see a passing resemblance in the amber color of the eyes, the unruly brown hair, the quick smile.  But there was something far different, beyond just the age, the musculature and the scruffy look.  (Especially the scruffy look.  Bart had tried to grow a beard once; really, he had.  But after concentrating on his face until all the blood rushed to his head and he nearly passed out, he'd decided it just couldn't be done.)  

    There was something about him that just set him apart.  A sense of maturity seemed to ooze from the man, a sense of composure.  Maybe it had come with age.  

    He finished, lamely.  "But you're... you're... old."

    "And you're still a master of vocabulary."  The older man grinned at him and then crouched down, bringing himself to eye-level.  "I'm you.  Sort of.  In a manner that would be really hard to explain."

    "So what are you doing here?"  Cissie asked as she made her way over to stand next to them, as well.  Bart watched her blue eyes move from him to the older him, and he was surprised by a kneejerk twinge of jealousy that grasped at him.

    The older him raised an eyebrow in response to Cissie.

    "I mean, not that I'm not ecstatic you are," she added hastily. "Because finishing my costumed career as an Arrowette-cicle is not on my top ten list of ways to go or anything."

    "I came back because..."  For a moment that composure seemed to crack slightly.  He stood up, looked down at the two teens for a long moment, and tried again.  "Because something very important was taken away from me.  And so I could give myself a chance to realize how important it is without having to lose it again.  Does that make sense?"

    Bart nodded slowly, thinking of the lifetime that had flashed in front of him when he tripped and knew he'd never be able to catch Cissie's arrow.  But the older him was looking at Arrowette when he said it, and he saw Cissie's cheeks go bright red and her lips curl upward for a moment before her eyes suddenly widened.

    "Bart!  You're fading away!"

    Bart looked down at himself.  He didn't feel like he was fading.  "I am?"

    "Not _you _you, Bart!  The _older_ you Bart!"  Cissie exclaimed.

    Impulse looked up and saw that she was right.  The older version of him was slowly becoming transparent.  He merely looked at the back of his hand and smiled softly, however.  "It's... it's okay.  I kind of expected this, anyway.  The timeline changed, so my world doesn't really exist anymore.  I sort of wiped it out by changing its history."

    Cissie looked half a step from an aneurism.  Her eyes nearly went as wide as Bart's goggles.  "Holy crap!  _You wiped out an entire world to come back here?!_"

    The older Bart held out his hand, now nearly transparent, in a placating gesture.  "No, no.  Just... trust me.  Everyone's still there.  It's just the future I come from isn't.  It's a little hard to explain without bringing temporal theory into it."

    He looked at Cissie for a long, drawn out moment, and said to her, quietly, "Just... whatever you do, be safe, okay?"

    She nodded, her eyes glimmering.

    And then he glanced at his younger self and leaned forward and whispered something into his ear.  And as Bart's eyes went every bit as wide as Cissie's had just a moment before, there was a soft flare of white light surrounding the older him, and with a sound like the wind through the grass, he was gone.

    The two stood there for a moment in thoughtful silence.

    Robin came back through the door of the lab.  "Okay, STAR Labs Special Security's on their way with a transportable holding pen, and Red Tornado said— "  he stopped short, looked at the space where the older Bart had been a couple moments before.  "Okay, where is he?"

    "He..."  Bart shifted uncomfortably.  "He had to... uhm... sort of... go."

    "He... had to go?"  Robin asked, skeptically.  "Go where?"

    "Away."  Cissie stated.

    "Away."  Bart affirmed.

    "He had to go... away."  Robin echoed, touching his jaw.  "I don't suppose that he told you who he was or what made him decide to show up here, or anything like that?"

    He raised an eyebrow at the two.

    "Uhm..."  Bart hedged.  "Not really."

    Cissie shook her head emphatically.  "Not at all."

    "I... see."  Robin glowered, crossing his arms.  "So, let me see if I have this straight.  This 'mystery man' shows up here out of the blue, knows Cissie's real name, looks a hell of a lot like Bart, saves Cissie from her own arrow by moving at super-speed, takes out Volcano as if he knows exactly what would do the trick, and then just— I don't know—blows off, without telling either of you anything at all whatsoever, except for 'I have to go away'?"

    Cissie glanced at Bart.

    Bart glanced at Cissie.

    They both looked at Robin.

    "In a nutshell."  Bart said, nodding.

    "That's about the size of it."  Cissie said, nodding.

    "I swear, for every step we take forward, it's like we take two steps back," Robin sighed and dropped his head, pinching at the bridge of his nose through his mask.  "I for one will be extremely glad when everyone on this team actually gets to the point that we can start trusting one another."

    "Right you are, oh Secretive Identity Leader, sir."  Cissie saluted and gave her most innocent smile.  

    "I'll work on my trust issues, Mister Batman Junior, sir," Bart said, mirroring her salute and cherubic expression.

    Robin looked at the two of them for a long, dark-eyed moment, and then turned and stalked through the hole in the wall, toward the next lab.  

    "Secretive Identity Leader," he muttered sourly.  "I'll bet the JLA never has to deal with this sort of thing." 


	6. Epilogue

A Moment Too Late

By ArgoForg 

(argoforg@earthlink.net)

**Disclaimer:** All characters from Young Justice are copyright © 2001-2002 DC Comics, and the characters are used without permission for fan-fiction. No copyright infringement is intended.  I am not making any profit from their use.  Really.  I swear.  I don't ever profit from nothin'.  Sigh.

**Author Notes:**  Read.  Review, if you want.  I'll keep it simple this time around.  If the names are wrong, you may lambaste me.  I just hope everyone likes it.

* * * * *

EPILOGUE

    _Now..._

    The stars stretched out above them, pinpricks of glittering white on a field of endless blue-black, and not for the first time, it occurred to Bart that he never had really paid all that much attention to just looking at them before.  

    But when you were stretched out on a hillside, with nothing more to do but watch them and think, he considered, you just noticed things about the stars that you didn't before.  Here, in the outskirts of Manchester, where the last few street lights were all you had to light your way and it was just you and the sky, it was different.  If you really looked close at them, he thought, just gazed at the spaces between the brighter ones, it seemed like you could make out the dim glint of further stars where you were sure there was nothing but blackness before.  It was actually kind of cool.

    He stayed there for what felt like a long time, just lying there, watching them and thinking.  He'd had a lot on his mind lately, after all, and for Bart Allen, that was a fairly new experience.  

    "Okay, I give."

    He craned his neck, looking to his side.  Cissie lay there on the hillside next to him, her arms resting behind her head, pillowing it— her blonde hair was spread out in the grass, like a blanket, behind her. 

    He quirked a brow at her.  "You give?  Give what?"

    "I give up."  She looked at him, and although there was only the dim light of the nearest street lamp to light her, his vision had gotten used to the darkness and he could see the way her eyes sought out his.  She pulled herself to a sitting position, shook out her hair, leaving bits of grass on her light blue sweatshirt and her faded jeans.  Then she crossed her arms over her knees, and cocked her head.  "Do you really think that was you?"

    Bart shrugged, and after a moment, his eyes went back up to the sky and he nodded.  "Yeah.  I'm pretty sure."

    "Do you..."  she trailed off, rested her chin on her arms, glanced at him again.  "Do you really think he traveled back in time just to... you know...?"

    "To save you?"  He sat up, looking at her in polite confusion, and in a burst of speed brushed the grass from his hair and then from his unbuttoned St. Louis Cardinals jersey and the maroon longsleeve beneath it.  "Of course.  Why wouldn't he?  I'd do the same thing."

    He paused.  "I guess that sort of makes sense, though, if he and me are the same person.  Sorry.  Thinking of us both as me is a little confusing."

    She waved him off, smiling a bit more now.  

    "It's okay.  I mean..."  She exhaled a sigh, and from the look on her face, it was a happy one.  Or at least, he took it as such.  "It's just really kinda different, to think that someone would actually go that far to do something like that for me.  It's kind of nice."

    He smiled at her.  "Better than dinner in Italy?"

    "It comes close."  She grinned, then inclined her head, looked at the stars again.  "Do you mind me asking, what did he say to you?"

    "The other me?"

    "No, I mean Superboy."  She glanced at him, a few threads of golden-blonde hair dipped down over her face, not hiding the impish expression at all.  "Of course I mean the other you, Bart.  He whispered to you and your eyes got as big as saucers.  What did he say?"

    Bart looked at her, the words of the older man that was him leaping right into his head.  _I've given you a second chance, Bart.  That's one thing I never had.  So you damned well better not screw it up, or I'll come back and haunt you in ways even Max never dreamed of._  

    He cleared his throat, his cheeks heating.  He hoped she didn't notice.  "Uhm.  He told me to... ahh... take care of you.  You know, watch out for you and stuff.  And... as long as I did that... my future... uhm, we... we would be cool."

    Cissie arched an eyebrow at him.  "Really?"

    "Pretty much."  Bart hedged, shrugging.  After a moment, he ventured: "Uhm, Cissie?"

    She cocked her head cutely at him.  "Mm?"

    "Uhm, you know how you said before, that I was kinda new at male-female relations and all?"  Bart asked, trying to find something to occupy his hands.  He ended up plucking up blades of grass and systematically tying them into knots.  "Well, I know you're right.  I'm kinda lost sometimes when it comes to it.  I don't want to go too fast or anything, I just want to do it right, because... well, you mean a lot to me.  So, can you... I dunno... tell me if I screw up, so I can make it better?"

    Her smile grew a fraction wider and her hand skimmed across the grass to find his and hold it steady.  "I think I'd be okay with that, Bart."

    He looked at her hand, on his, then at her, and smiled shyly.  "I mean, this is all sort of new ground, and you're really special to me, just like you were to the other me.  So you don't have to feel bad if you have to tell me, 'Bart, you're supposed to walk here' or 'Bart, this is when you give me a hug' or 'Bart, don't eat the roses' or whatever.  I'd just rather learn from you than anyone else."

    "Bart..."

    "Cause, I mean, I may not always be the best learner, but I really want to— " 

    She leaned over to him and pressed a finger to his lips.  "Bart."

    His eyes widened.  _Oh, tell me that wasn't a screw-up already.  I would— I mean, that other me would— I mean I would kill me!_

    "I promise.  I'll help you."  She said.  But her smile never faded, instead, it merely curled up a millimeter more as she let her finger fall and just gazed at him, long and hard.  He could see the blue eyes glimmer in the dim light of the faraway street lamps.

    "Hey..."  She said softly, after another long, drawn-out moment.

    "Hm?"

    A softer smile.  "This is when you kiss your girlfriend."

    "Oh."  Bart said, and then realization of what she said kicked in, a microsecond later.  His eyes widened.  "_Oh!_"

    With no further words, he did.  And for once, the shortest attention span alive was more than content to let the moment draw out as long as it wanted to.

    Overhead, the stars glimmered and winked and kept their own silent vigil. 

* * *

    _Elsewhen..._

    It had taken some wheedling, a pinch of persuasion, a little bit of pleading.  It had also taken a lot of glares, insults and two hours filled with enough pacifying diplomacy to make Gandhi throw down his glasses in disgust and take a few good swings.

    But in the end, with Hunter playing mediator, everything had worked out as well as he could have reasonably expected it to.  The older Bart Allen had given up the Linear Men's weapons, communications gear and tech, and— after the Linear Authority arrived to cut them out of the conference room—  had been confined to the temporal brig, where it was generally expected he would remain until he was brought to trial.  

    So the Linear Men were rescued from their plight, if one could call it that.  Hunter himself balked at using the word 'plight' for being sealed into a room, bereft of chronal equipment.  It just reeked of sensationalism.  But from the moment Allen had been taken away, both alternates of Matthew Ryder wouldn't leave it alone.  Hunter supposed he asked for it, on some counts.  As the Linear Men made their way back to the main monitoring room to check on the progress of the temporal spike, he'd made the mental lapse of asking what they thought would happen to Allen.

    That had touched off the fuse to the powder keg, all right.

    "...don't know why you worry, but as far as I'm concerned, if the Authority lock him in a chronal cage and drop it into the entropy at the end of time, it might just balance the scales."  Waverider was saying as the lift arrived; it was just the latest in a string of vehement comments from the flame-haired variant.

    "I might note the time of his trial, just so I can keep visiting it at the exact moment the judge passes his sentence,"  Matthew growled.  Ryder rarely got this incensed, but when he did, it wasn't usually in half-measures.

    Hunter was hard-pressed not to roll his eyes.  He managed to look at Waverider without doing so, however.  "So why didn't you just skip back in time a few hours?  Maybe drug him in the guest chambers?"

    "If I could have, I would have.  Possibly injected the bastard with cyanide."  Waverider scowled.

    Hunter couldn't quite hold back from rolling his eyes this time.  "Of course you would."

    Liri looked at him.  "Hunter, we're outside of time, here, remember?  With the exception of the monitor room, which is sort of a 'bridge' to real-time, there's no such thing as 'a couple hours'.  Waverider might not have to use outside technology to traverse the timestream, but doing it here is another matter entirely.  There's only one singular place, one singular time."

    "So he'd be traveling from point A to point A whether he wanted to or not."   Hunter hummed.  "Well, that's certainly interesting."

    "Contriving, is more like it."  Ryder muttered.  "And worse than that, it was lethal.  Especially in this case.  While you were busy playing ambassador and bending over backwards to his demands—"

    Hunter raised an eyebrow.  "I had no idea he demanded to be jailed and fitted for a trial from the Linear Authority."

    "While you were mollycoddling him, then."

    "Oh, come on, Ryder."  Hunter laughed.  "You mean to say—"

    "Don't 'come on, Ryder' me!"  Matthew interrupted hotly.  "You all but took his side in the matter.  You let him play you and stall for time, you acted like a guidance counselor rather than an officer of temporal law.  You even asked him on more than one occasion how he was feeling!  You treated him like a guest, not like a terrorist!"

    "No, I mean, people still use the word _mollycoddle?_  Do you have any idea how much you sound like a 19th-century grandfather when you say it?"  Hunter smirked.  "Don't you dare mollycoddle that kid, Edith.  Let him get a nice job in the sweatshop, like he wants."

    "Is this some sort of _joke_ to you?"  Waverider glared as he made his way to his station.

    "If it is, I'm not laughing."  Liri reported from hers.  She called the image on her screen up on the main monitors.  Ryder and Hunter both flicked a gaze up there, as a single, flowing timeline now, not two overlapping ones.  No spike.  No indirect flow of history.  All evidence of the old history had been replaced with that of the new timeline.

    "Damn it."  Ryder hissed.  "We're too late.  The new timeline's in place."

    "I notice Earth didn't blow up."  Hunter commented, aside.

    Ryder glared at him, pointed at the main screen.  "This is _your _fault, Hunter.  I'd wipe that smarmy grin off your face as of right now, if I were you.  A variant timeline has superseded the way everything's supposed to be because of _your _interference and _his.  _You're going to be lucky if you're a Linear Man any longer than it takes to set this all right!"

    Hunter sighed.  "Fine, then.  First off.  We have the temporal and spatial coordinates of where history went awry, right?" 

    Liri nodded.  

    "And we still have the original timeline's data on file, since we're immune to changes in the temporal environment here."  

    "Right."

    Hunter raised an eyebrow.  "Have we investigated the changes from this timeline to that one?"

    "Already gathering that data," Liri noted, and looked over at Waverider, who nodded in agreement.  She looked at her screens as the data began to assimilate, her eyes narrowing.  "It's fairly hard to make out.  There are too many variances looking from the end of time back.  I can start at the point where history changes and compare."

    "That sounds reasonable."  Waverider concurred.

    Hunter spoke up from his own station.  "Better still... start with his own timelines.  The most notable changes would seem to come from there, wouldn't they?"

    Liri looked at Hunter, then Matthew.

    "Do it."  Ryder said tightly, his face still blotched with anger.

    "Compiling that data now."  Liri reported.

    Hunter looked at his own screen, with a small frown.  "Nothing has changed up to him helping to form Young Justice.  Check later.  Does he, for instance, still cure the outbreak of the Leimann Virus in 2032?"

    "No.  2028."  Liri Lee spoke up, still looking at her screen.  Her brows furrowed in consternation.  "Four years earlier than before.  I'm still searching for the reason for that change."

    "I see."  Hunter said neutrally.  He glanced at Liri, asking her without words for more information. 

    "The timeline's stabilized, but the data on the new timeline is still gathering; it's making the information upload a lot slower."  She paused.  "Yes.  Got it.  In 2028, after the first major outbreak of the biochemical virus that attacks the central nervous system, he was instrumental in creating a means of hyper-metabolizing human antibodies through the Speed Force to fight off infection.  Newsvids of the time estimated that half the population of the Earth might have succumbed within ten years of first outbreak, but his work saved easily several million, maybe even several hundred million, lives.  Apparently he and..."  

    She trailed off, momentarily, and her eyes grew wide.  She found her voice again, with effort.  "He and his wife, a metabiologist, formulated the cure together, according to the vids.  That wasn't there before, either..."

    "His wife."  Hunter said; again his voice was neutral, but there was a ghost of a smile touching his mouth, as well.  

    Liri looked back at the screen and then met Hunter's eyes.  "His... wife.  Dr. Cecilia Jones-Allen."

    "So..." Hunter let the single word hang in the silence for a moment, compellingly.  "In essence, Liri, you're saying that if we stabilize the old timeline, as you've all suggested...  if we stop this 'temporal anomaly' from changing his future and, we can only assume, saving his future wife... we will in effect be completely obliterating several million— perhaps several _hundred_ million— people from the pages of history.  Am I following that correctly?"

    Liri looked back at the screen, despondently.  Her silence was more than enough answer.

    "Well."  Hunter looked at each of them in turn.  "Seems we have no choice in the matter, from what you've all told me.  After all, the rightful timeline has to persevere, right?  The history and the future both are in our hands and ours alone.  So who wants to be the first to stop this horrible time-wrecker and at the same time throw the switch to wipe out several million people with a virulent bio-plague?  Liri?"

    Liri did not look at him.

    "Waverider?  You were vocal before.  Cyanide him and toss him into the entropy at the end of time, if I recall.  How would you like to do that on a much grander scale?  Would you like to be the one to have your name linked with consigning several million people to the status of _never-were_?"  Hunter's eyes made their way slowly across the room.

    Waverider touched his lips, not bothering to look up, or answer.

    "Ah."  Hunter said quietly.  "Matthew?  You think this probably falls within the acceptable loss parameters?  I mean, we still have that one-point-two percent margin for error, right?  The important thing is that the Earth itself survives.  The people aren't all that important, you think?"

    "Of course not."  Ryder's eyes narrowed as he looked at Hunter.  Hunter knew Matthew could hear his own words being thrust back at him.  "You bastard.  You knew all along."

    Hunter shrugged, his hands folded serenely in front of him.  "I didn't _know,_ Matthew.  And I'll be the first to admit it.  I cheated.  I took the time while you were all fluxing in and out, gathering data, and plucked our little time traveler out of the timestream by finding the point where history changed, and working from there."  

    "And then all I did was talk to him.  It didn't take long for him to show me he wasn't some sort of temporal tyrant.  He was a desperate man, making a desperate act to try to save someone he loved.  That's not evil."

    "It's misguided."  Waverider said, after a long silence.

    "So is losing your humanity by following a strict set of guidelines and not thinking about the people involved."  Hunter returned.

    "We _police_ the timelines, Hunter—"  He started, his black eyes starting to flare again.

    But Hunter interrupted, stabbing a finger at him.  "Listen up, Waverider.  All of you.  _People_ _make_ the timelines.  _People make _the history.  If we forget that, we might as well not worry about doing a damned thing but sitting her monitoring.  Because if not for the people, there wouldn't be a history to police in the first place.  I hope like hell working together hasn't made any of you forget that.  Wasn't it you that said 'someone should make a difference'?  Or am I remembering that wrong?"

    Waverider blinked, and then slowly turned his face away, chagrinned. "No.  You're remembering it right." 

    There was quiet for a long moment in the monitor room as those words slowly suffused among the Linear Men.

    "In other words, you played a hunch that everything would work out for the best in the end."  Matthew said quietly.  

    Hunter shrugged.  "That's all any of us can do sometimes.  Even with all we know about time, sometimes, following instincts and rolling the dice is the best option."

    "You do realize that by allowing this one temporal anomaly, you've introduced several million new instances into the timestream, correct?"  Waverider said crossly.

    "Maybe several hundred million," Liri interposed.  "Not counting any offspring..."

    Waverider groaned.  "Do you realize how long it will take just to catalogue them?  Just to see what impact they have on the fluidity of history?  We'll have to study just to find out if any of them have a major impact on the timestream, Hunter."

    Hunter leaned back into his chair and smiled thinly.  "Then there's no reason we shouldn't get on it, right?"

    He looked past them, to the screens beyond, their data still assimilating in the past and rippling into existence in the now, and then he spread his hands as if to encompass the entire lab.

    "After all, we're here, at Vanishing Point.  So we can truthfully say that we have all the time in the world."

* * *

    The cell was nothing like Bart envisioned. 

    Of course, all things considered, he wasn't really sure what exactly he envisioned, but something about the word cell just didn't lend to the idea of a sanitary room.  Part of him seemed to get the idea of a dirty B-movie chamber of horrors with hay on the floor and rats all around, the other part thought of some dank holding cell with a barred door with a mail-slot window, one toilet and maybe a sink.  

    The small room he'd been shuttled into was nothing like that.  The walls were a mute white, and there was a self-cleaning stall and a fairly comfortable cot inside.  One whole wall was missing, leaving the front of the room open, but Bart knew from touching the seemingly empty air that some sort of protective forcefield was in place to keep him inside.  Not that he really minded: if anything, the cell wasn't too dirty or rat-infested; it was almost sterile.  At worst, it bored him silly, just staring at the same three walls, so he'd gotten used to closing his eyes and playing VR games over and over in his head.

    In fact, he was so intent on the second to last level of Hydrafoil-7 that he wasn't even really aware he'd gotten a visitor until he heard the familiar voice talking to his guard, saying he needed to talk with the prisoner.  And even then, he thought he might have been dreaming until the white-haired man entered his cell after holding up his card, and then crouched down close to the floor and looked at him.

    "Satisfied?"  Hunter asked, softly.

    "Not really."  Bart responded, smiling without humor.  "I mean, I hear we're outside of time.  So if I don't even know when days pass, how am I supposed to carve hash-marks into my wall?"

    Hunter smirked.

    "So why are you here?  I figured the way Firestorm was glaring at you, this would be the last place you'd want to be."

    "Firestorm?"  Hunter asked, confusedly.

    "Takion, Firestorm.  Guy with fire for hair.  I didn't know which."  Bart shrugged.

    "Oh.  Waverider.  Well, he'll get over it, I think."  He looked at the young man with two days of scruffiness settled in around his lips and cheeks.  "I thought I ought to get here pretty quick, just in case.  But it doesn't look like you're aging or anything.  I half-expected to find a pile of bones."

    Bart looked at his arms, almost as if they weren't his own.  They still only barely felt like his.  The small mirror above the sink constantly made him double-take.  His voice didn't even sound like his.  But he was starting to get used to it; it seemed like his grasp of concepts, his pensiveness, his state of mind had become more stable, too.  Like his mind had begun to catch up with his body.  "I think I'm stable.  The first time, I stabilized when I went faster than I ever had before.  This time, well, I guess breaking light speed and touching the Speed Force sort of tends to do that to you.  Wally'd be thrilled to know it worked."

    "Wally?"  Another blank stare.

    "West.  The Flash."  Bart supplied.

    "Oh, _him._  I should've known."  Hunter grinned.  "He time-travels, what, monthly?"

    Bart found himself smiling.  "Something like that.  He is the Fastest Man Alive."

    The smile faded.  "In his time, I mean."

    Hunter let the silence fall for a moment.  "Well, I'm here for a few reasons.  But there's one I'm sure you're interested in, if you didn't already know it.  She's okay."  

    He could literally feel his amber eyes brighten, happy tears springing to them, even though he knew he'd saved her once.  "Cissie?"

    "I assume that would be her.  Cecilia.  Everything turned out fine, from what I've been able to piece together."  He made a smaller smile.  "Three kids and a dog, house in the suburbs, saved the world from a bio-plague and various other world menaces, both in and out of tights."

    Bart blinked, confused, but the smile never left his face.  "I'll take your word for it.  I really made a difference?"

    "More than you might know."  Hunter said with a heavy exhalation.

    Bart glanced at him, the smile fading.  Something about the way he said that garnered attention.  "What do you mean?"

    Hunter held up a hand and shook his head.  "Nothing, really.  Just that sticking my neck out for you nearly cost me.  I took the chance that the historical effects of you saving your Cissie would be minimal.  And that wasn't quite the case."

    Bart cocked his head. "Historical effects?  I don't follow."

    Hunter stood up, and paced the perimeter of the cell, which wasn't much at all.  "Let me give you an analogy.  Think of history as a winding stream."

    Bart sighed.  "Do all white-haired men like to talk in weird idioms like that?"

    Hunter stopped, looked at him, confusion brimming on his face.  "Excuse me?"

    "Never mind."  Bart waved him off.

    "Well, okay.  Anyway, history is a stream.  Occasionally, there will be someone that tries to dam it up, tries to vastly alter the course of history.  And that's what the Linear Men are here for.  To stop exactly that sort of thing."

    Bart nodded.

    "But much more often, there are people that— for lack of a better term— make small splashes.  Like dropping a pebble into the stream.  People that travel back and forth into time and make very subtle changes that aren't nearly as violent or as noticeable.  Take the Flash, for instance.  He takes a jaunt into the 19th century, save a couple kids that fell into a mine or somesuch, who in turn have no major impact on the historical circumstances.  Neither of them become world leaders or invent anything notable.  That's a pebble."

    "Okay."  Bart said, gamely.  "A pebble.  Got it."

    "All right.  You're following."  Hunter smiled and nodded.  "You, sir, are a boulder."

    Bart winced.  "I feel a headache coming on."  

    "Good.  I didn't want to be the only one."  Hunter said.  "You see, in saving your someday-to-be wife, you altered history.  But the two of you, together, had some profound historical after-effects.  To put it succinctly, the two of you saved roughly a hundred ninety-four million people from dying of the bio-engineered plague I was telling you about.  Even if you assume that only half of them had children afterward, you have, what... ninety-seven million new variables in the flow of history... all of which were unaccounted for before.  And that increases exponentially as time goes on, because their existence by itself alters the flow of history."  

    "A bunch of people want my head, don't they?"  Bart said after a couple moments of thought.

    "Well, the Linear Authority was not pleased."  Hunter said with a small smile as he crouched again.  "But thankfully, they can see what I told the others.  Even they're not bloodthirsty enough to summarily wipe out a whole cross-section of the population just for the sake of keeping an old timeline straight.  They've even made the files for the whole incident confidential, viewable only by the highest authorities."

    "So she's safe.  They're safe."  Bart exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.  He looked at Hunter.  "What about me?"

    Hunter folded his hands in front of him.  "That's up to you, really."

    "Me?  What do you mean?"

    "Well, you really aren't affected by the flow of history, Mister Allen.  You're what we call a hypertime variant.  When you traveled back in time and changed history, your own timeline effectively ceased to exist as real-time.  Since you were outside of time, it didn't affect you, or you likely would have been consigned to oblivion.  However, because of that, we can't very well plop you back into the timestream, because you don't belong to the new timeline.  And besides, with the way speedsters play fast and loose with time-travel..."

    "I might somehow end up meeting myself.  Again."  Bart finished for him.

    Hunter nodded approvingly.  "You catch on fast.  At any rate, although the charges were officially dropped, you represent a problem.  So I'm here to give you what are basically the two options left open for you."

    "Stay here in the cell, for one."  Bart guessed.

    Hunter nodded.  "Not here.  But imprisonment, yes."

    "Doesn't sound like much of an option."  Bart's lips pursed.  "What's the other?"

    "Community service."

    Bart stared.  "What, picking up trash in the fly-zones?"

    "Not exactly."  Hunter stood again.  "See, like I said, there are roughly a hundred ninety-four million changed instances and several million more new ones that have been introduced into the timestream, all thanks to you... each with their own new histories, possibly new offspring, and completely new divergent timelines from the ones we have catalogued.  The Earth of the thirty-fifth century alone has a remarkably different appearance from the one we have on file.  And that's sure to be the case the further along in history we progress.

    "People can take this one of two ways.  They can moan about all those changes in the timeline, or they can treat it as an opportunity to learn about several billion new people whose files had never been created because their ancestors died of a plague your other self stopped four years early.  I'm choosing the second."

    He paused for a moment, looking at him.  "Based on your ability to speed-learn, and thanks to a recommendation put in by the Linear Men, I've got the okay to allow to you to be able to, too."

    "Be able to what?"

    "To be an information collector.  A historian.  Someone who sees the course history's taken, to find out what you really did when you broke the time barrier and saved that one person."  He reached into a pouch on his belt, pulled out a card, and tossed it to him.

    Bart caught it, looked.  It was a small metal card, smaller than his library card.  Raised holographic lettering showed the image of an hourglass and the words _Linear Authority_ in Interlac.  He raised his eyes at Hunter and smiled softly.  "You really mean this?"

    "No, I offer cards to people in jail all the time just so I can get their hopes up and then laugh when I quash them."  Hunter smirked.  "Yes, I mean it."

    "It sounds good."  Bart flicked the card between his fingers.  "But won't this mean I still might run into myself, though?"

    "Under Ryder's command?  You'll be lucky if you get within ten centuries of yourself."  He stood up, chuckling, and notified the guard to open the cell.  "And you'll be probationary.  For a while, you may not even get anywhere near temporal equipment.  But it's an opportunity.  And when you go out there, among all those people that you brought about, I can almost tell you one thing for sure."

    Bart looked at the card again and slowly followed Hunter to the door as the forcefield dissipated.  _Bart Allen, Linear Man.  _It had a nice ring to it.  "What's that?"

    "Every second you're out there learning about them, you'll learn about yourself, as well."  Hunter said, his smile fading.  "I know I have."

    Bart looked at the older man, the smile on his face tracing its way up to his amber eyes as they stepped into the moving causeway that led back to Vanishing Point.

    "Hunter, I ever tell you that you remind me of someone named Max?"

_End_


End file.
